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
The Police Are Not Your Friend, Not Here, Not There, Not Anywhere.
How would you identify a good country? This question or something similar to it has come up in several conversations with friends recently. In the wake of yet another farce of an election in Cameroon coupled with a crisis which grows more violent and erratic by the day, friends and acquaintances I have spoken with have expressed their disdain at having been born Cameroonian. Some have mentioned wishing they could belong to another nation, or at least be resident there. While I understand that these feelings are a product of frustration, I have found myself responding to their declarations with the question: so what country do you think is better and why? Their responses always expose what they prioritize at the said time as well as what they feel Cameroon fails at the most. After the most recent of such a conversation, I turned the question on myself. What would be evidence of a good country for me? Free and fair elections? Leaders that are changed with regularity? Equitable participation/representation of genders, ages, faiths, and abilities? All of those came to mind, but none stood out as much as the state of law enforcement. *** For a brief period of my childhood, I lived with my immigrant single mother in the United States. It was the mid-1990s and after school, I would be cared for by neighbours who were immigrants themselves but relatively better ‘established’ having lived in the US for longer. It was in those spaces that I learned what I needed to fit in, from the first generation children who had come before me, I would learn of games like UNO, Dominoes and Cops and Robbers. During parties and meetings when the adults had their fun upstairs, we kids would be sent to a basement or backyard to play with each other. If it were a backyard, a game of Cops and Robbers would typically be on the program and it all began with picking those who would be the cops and who would be the robbers; this equalled who would be the good guy and who would be the bad guy. That’s what American culture first taught me of police. They were the good guys, who caught bad guys and saved the day. Even at school, when asked the oft-repeated “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question, several classmates had said they wanted to be policemen. And why not? Back then we watched COPS (if we managed to stay up past bedtimes), we sang the show’s jingle with glee “Bad boys, bad boys whatchu you gonna do, whatchu gonna do when they come for you?” and we believed as we repeated the tune that bad boys got caught by the police, the ‘good guys’ and that it was always best to call 911 so the police come rescue you. By the time I was 11, that idea of who the police are had become a bit tarnished. Only slightly, but still. An African-American classmate had recounted her fear of the cops discovering that she was at home alone most days and in charge of watching over her siblings because her mother worked multiple jobs and her dad was in jail. She warned me after I had received a particularly brutal whooping from my mom, not to let anyone know; because the police could take you away from your family altogether and foster-care was hell, she said. She had been there for some time herself. I took the lesson to heart and soon began noting the fear and apprehensiveness displayed by adults when police passed by. I began noting how my mom and other adults spoke to these men in uniform the way I would speak to adults when weary of stepping on the wrong toe. Nonetheless, at that age the police were still people to be respected, still people I believed one ought to call for help. I returned home at age 12, the first thing I would note about police in Cameroon would be their standing on the roadside. They didn’t always have cars nearby and back then most just held batons and a stick with nails which would be extended out on the road as a threat to drivers: stop or puncture your tires. I recall asking during one trip from Bamenda to Yaoundé what would happen if the driver drove on, what if the driver saw the police ahead and dodged the stick with nails? What could they do without a patrol car and gun? Obviously, Cameroon didn’t have a sophisticated license plate tracking system. The adults I asked just told me it was a bad idea, the policeman would remember you they claimed, or warn the group of police at the next checkpoint to watch out for your vehicle. It seemed lame to me. A lot of things seemed lame to me back then as I compared the country I now call home to the one I had spent some six childhood years in. But the police, in particular, were very lame; all those I came in contact with spoke French, which I couldn’t understand nor speak. They were forever scowling and didn’t even give the impression of being at your service. Rather they were to be served. People would give up their treasured front seats at the bus for the gender me, often at the beckoning of the driver who hoped this ‘esteemed’ passenger would be recognized through the windscreen when the bus was stopped at checkpoints and the driver given less hassle. Those who gave up seats did so for the greater good I suppose. Police in Cameroon as I would come to learn were not those to be called upon for help. At no time have I been taught the emergency number for the Cameroon police, and I bet a vox pop would prove very few know it. The average man won’t even want to know the number; what would they use it for? If
The Extravagance of Black Forgiveness
A friend of mine recently asked me why I haven’t written about the situation back home. He said he “wished I was still back home because I’d feel more acutely the pain of the situation and write some good pieces”. I tell him that I, like many others, am tired. Fed up with the stupidity and arrogance which drives this situation. Yet, if conversations could run for pages long, I would have simply shared the following piece which I wrote at the end of November 2017 but never shared- till now. *** A week after Zimbabwe offered the world what may be the most civil coup ever, you are still reading articles, think-pieces overanalyzed op-ed pieces on the ‘rise and fall of Uncle Bob’. You are still interested despite the repetition, despite the dread the writers generally project of what next. You are still interested because in reading those pieces you are encouraged that someday (hopefully soon) your own Mugabe shall fall, or be toppled… whichever way would do. But a week later you come across new information, details of the largess which characterizes Mugabe’s pension upon forced retirement. His presidential salary will continue as is, he receives a lump sum of 10 million USD, maintains all properties acquired as president, health coverage, and several other benefits. An obviously generous pension considering whatever his family had already looted. The generosity baffles you; this cannot possibly be the sanction for dictatorship, this cannot be the sanction for forcing millions of your people into exile and holding the growth of a whole nation hostage. This cannot possibly be what people marched for. You are not Zimbabwean, so you read the comments. Most say they’re fine with it, that it is better than having him in power. That Zimbabwe must move on. That they do not need to fight with the tyrant. One particular comment stands out: “Zimbabwean’s should forgive the bastard not for him but to free themselves”. The comment tugs at your memory, you have heard that before. You have heard it on several occasions. You heard it when Gambia’s Jammeh lost “Don’t mention prosecuting him, just let him go so you can move on…” You heard similar last year and dozens of times before when a Cameroonian immigrant woman you know was told to forgive her abusive husband for the sake of her kids “Don’t put those children through the court process in this country ooo. These people will ask them all sort of questions. We are not white people. Settle this in your family so you can move on with dignity.” You have heard this so many times, linked to scripture like whole countries are of one faith. Like forgiveness can be demanded. A commodity one can order. Yet this time, perhaps because you are reading the articles expectantly looking to Zimbabwe as a beacon of hope for the potential toppling of your own dictator, you are upset by the extravagance of black forgiveness. You recall the first comment you made upon learning of black petting zoos, and how black children were caged to be observed like animals. You said: We have forgiven too much. We have. And we have forgiven on behalf of too many, who never did and never may get closure. You also recall the Charlottesville shooting and the quickly offered, widely publicised forgiveness of Dylan Roof. You had wondered then as you wonder now, who gave them the authority to forgive. Yes, they were related to the victims, just like those who now forgive are Zimbabwean, but the evil was done to us all, has marked us all, has built anger in us all… who and what quenches the fire of injustices when one forgives for the whole. And why are we the ones always forgiving? We Blacks, we Africans, we Women. Why does the victim get told “to forgive is divine”, like victimisation made one saintly, propelled them into the realm of divinity. And if we must forgive, which is just fine by the way, do we not deserve to get an apology first? No repentance? No justice? Do we just bury the pain like a secret hidden in a chest for another generation to dig and discover? Does the dictator get a scholarship named after him like Rhodes so three generations pass and our children know him as a benefactor rather than an abuser? Above all, as you contemplate this exceedingly gracious treatment of a fallen dictator you wonder what it means for you and yours. As you look at Zimbabwe as an example, if no longer a beacon, you wonder why one should bother decrying the exploitation, mismanagement and abuse of Cameroonian government officials who would be so readily forgiven. If on one hand, African leaders who leave power ‘with good will” receive a boon by way of the Mo Ibrahim Prize effectively congratulating them for doing what the constitutions they swore to uphold said they ought to do…and those who don’t leave get generous retirement packages like Mugabe, promises to be left alone and not tried for crimes like Jammeh, or promises of lifelong Party leadership positions like dos Santos… if those are the options why denounce your Mugabe. If those are the options they have to choose from, they never really fall. And justice is never really served, definitely not implemented by us. For we forgive. Our forgiveness is expected, extravagantly gracious, shortsighted and shallow. Doing an even greater injustice to the memory of the injustice done to us. It is our forgiveness that has descendants of abusers, still enjoying historical privilege yet forming trade unions and denying that apartheid was an injustice. It is our forgiveness that has Kanye West saying slavery was a choice. It is our forgiveness that leaves our Cameroonian children unable to name the revolutionaries which fought for our independence. It is as a result of our profligate forgiveness that fifty years on, we have more statues and schools named after colonial figures than we do
Musings on 17th January
The 17th of January will forever hold meaning for me. For one, it’s the birthday of a close friend and founding member of Better Breed Cameroon- the youth development organization I coordinate. Sama Randy, passed away three years ago this month and has since been remembered by the Youth Essay Contest we have since renamed in his honor (please click here to learn more about the Sama Randy Youth Write Contest). Last year, another memorable event took place on the 17th of January. On the evening of this day last year, our government decided to take stifling of opposing voices to another level. It was a Tuesday, around 6pm. We heard rumors- turned fact- of the arrest of leaders of the Consortium who were at the time heading protests against the government over Anglophone marginalization. These arrests were followed by an internet shut-down in the two Anglophone regions where protests were situated. Looking back, I can say that day marked the greatest mistake our government has made in years. With the decision made on that day, our government not only validated our protests but equally gave the opportunity to fanatics to spread and grow leading to the impasse we now experience. See, that day marked a turning point for people of my generation. We of the “android generation” (as they call our 90’ Babies forward) have known our government to be corrupt, our officials to be power-drunk thieves, selfish brownnosers to their core. Yet, we had until this past year only known of our governments’ brutality only through the lens of history, through exaggerated quartier tales we grew up hearing; like “did you know the first lady’s former lover was killed when our president took interest in her or did you know our former first lady died mysteriously?” All rumors we could not confirm but which ensured we looked at our officials with the right tinge of fear. Similar to the way our parents and those generally older and more aware bowed lower in the face of gendarmes and generally feared to talk about politics in certain places. Yes, up until last year we knew our government was bad, but we hadn’t known the fear of those who had witnessed it firsthand. As a Nigerian proverb goes; a child who crosses the river carried on the mother’s back would say the water was not deep. We had read of Ahidjo’s governments’ complicity with the French in crushing the Maquisards and assassinating Cameroon’s early patriots. We had listened as our parents discussed the infamous disappearance of the Bepanda 9 incident following the opposition to our current president’s changing of the constitution. But still, we had been sheltered and had yet to witness our government shutdown a part of the country, arbitrarily arrest hundreds on flimsy excuses and cart them off to Yaoundé as though they were Jews to Hitler’s concentration camps. We had not lived the fear of militarized towns, nor imagined government officials could lie so blatantly about the regions we inhabited. We had not experienced government imposed curfews and ‘states of emergency’ nor had we known that the police we scorned as thieves could also be heartlessly brutal batterers. January 17th 2017 set off a chain of events which brought an end to our relative naivety and unleashed possibilities- possibilities of the worst kind- into our minds. After experiencing months of internet shutdown, closure of free press, brutal repression of protesters (peaceful or otherwise), refusal to dialogue, arrests of those who so much as expressed opinions of the issue online or in public… and even when the internet access was restored, even when some of those arbitrarily arrested were released, even then we saw that our administrators lacked basic managerial skills as they continuously chose force over dialogue, and denial over addressing of the problem. A year later, as I ponder on how things have developed, Langston Hughes’ most popular poem comes to mind. In Harlem, Hughes’ ponders on what happens to a dream deferred. Harlem BY LANGSTON HUGHES What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? Today I consider the state of my country, the effects of ignoring and then suppressing justifiable protests. I ponder on the consequences of whitewashing our history, denying the existence of two Cameroon’s and of having a government which- like the ill-famed ostrich- have buried their heads in the sand insisting there is no problem… and as I do this, I think of the above poem and I feel I can answer Hughes. A dream deferred shall fester and run. Like the dream of Ndeh Ntumazah’s One Kamerunn party now crusting over as ‘Ambazonia’. A dream deferred stinks rotten like the death of Bate Besong still an open sore in our history as with every other revolutionary who spoke up and was cut down. And by all indications, if the Anglophone dream continues to be deferred…it shall explode. Perhaps we should stop postponing and address the dreams this country was built on before they become nightmares.
So… What did 2017 teach you?
Earlier this year, I wrote on the development of the now year-long crisis which has plagued the Anglophone regions of Cameroon. I outlined the emergence of the struggle and build-up due to utter mishandling from the government and the frustration of a minority, all in hope of our collective learning as a nation. As the year comes to an end and the crisis still rages- with more violence than ever in some parts of these regions- I have wondered if we actually did learn anything. For me the end of year period is meant for reflection; a time for assessing the year about to pass by and preparing for the one about to begin. I have thus considered the lessons 2017 has taught me personally, lessons like: i. Some things/people will never be yours no matter how hard you work, how hard you pray and how much you may deserve it/them. We do not always get what we deserve. That is both a good and bad thing. ii. You matter. Someone impressionable is watching you, looking up to you, believing in you. So act like you matter. iii. Your work matters. Invest in it. Hone your craft. iv. Pain too can bloom things. It’s not the best fertilizer but it works. v. Not everyone you admire is right for you and you are not for everyone. And now I consider the lessons 2017 and the experiences of this year should have taught us all as Cameroonians. In case you’ve been dozing throughout the year, here are some takeaways in point form: 1- Before you start a protest have a plan. Advocacy is targeted, and meaningful. You can be an online activist, your voice is a powerful tool and your social media page is no doubt a useful platform BUT for you to be an advocate, you need to be targeting those in power able to change things or actively following procedure in changing them. Otherwise you’re not doing much. Anger at this government is justified, however misdirected anger and lack of strategy is deadly. We’ve been under this regime for 35+ years… anyone trying to save us from it should have used this time to come up with a good plan. It doesn’t have to be foolproof, but it should be logical. As a friend of mine put it a while back: Before you demand my allegiance to a new order, convince me that what you offer me is better than the last. 2- Hold your heroes to higher standards, this is not a game. A popular adage goes: An unchecked virtue is a vice; meaning what/who is good can easily go bad because of too much praise and too little criticism. I think this is the strongest lesson of the year. In our desire for change we, as Cameroonians have come to crown any loud voice as messiah. However this, the future of our nation and our collective well-being, is not a scenario where we can make do with “a one-eyed man in the land of the blind”. Perhaps because we’re not all that blind, most of us are just suffering from nearsightedness. So please check and double-check your heroes, does your hero/leader of choice make sexist remarks? Is he/or she knowledgeable of the laws/constitution they criticize? Is he or she transparent? Does he or she have lingering scandals? Is he or she a trusted source of verified information? Can he or she handle power without becoming power-drunk? We should have learned that he who cannot handle criticism now will be no better than Biya when it comes his turn to rule. He who would sacrifice others and ignore their real needs at this time, will not suddenly change with power. And not everyone who speaks up for us is meant to be our mouthpiece. Someone can appreciate the general problem, but due to their background and context, be out of touch with the other intersecting oppressions people in different classes, with different levels of education, and so forth experience. 3- Do your research, verify information. Fake news is real; spreading it is not a joke. We may all scoff at the government’s annoying message with veiled threats regarding the spread of fake news- particularly considering how much fake news they spread by lies of omission. Yet, it is an undeniable fact, that unverified information “forwarded as received” caused a lot of destruction of property and loss this year. Unverified information readily shared because it sounds sensational, appeals to our desired outcome or because we’re too damn lazy to cross check sources and possibility, caused a great deal of damage this year. Fake news damaged the credibility of a revolution and led to loss of property and life every time a rumor went around inciting young people to the streets where they were met with certain police brutality. Pray we have learned that not everything is worth sharing. In fact, let me make it clear in our most common language: *holds ear* make this thing sey forwarded as received end this 2017. If you don’t know the source and are not certain the info is true, keep it to yourself.4- In the words of MJ ‘They don’t really care about us”. It is hoped that we’ve learned that no one is coming to save us. That no one owes us more than we owe ourselves. That no one can do for us what we have yet to do for ourselves. This is for those who marched before embassies of France, the United Kingdom, Canada etc. but failed to hold their own ambassadors accountable. This is for those who readily spread rumors about UNESCO canceling a school year only to see some (middle class) children progress to higher institutions with the release of results while theirs were at home. If nothing else, may 2017 have taught us that we must organize to save ourselves. The international community has never been an impartial judge. If we don’t care about ourselves,
So This is How it Starts?
When you watch Hotel Rwanda, one of your first thoughts is: this story is incomplete. How did they get there, that early scene? How do a people get to a point where it is ok to order machetes for killing other human beings they had lived with, worked beside, bought from, and sold to? In years to come, you will read of other countries – or courtesy of Half of a Yellow Sun- of countries that were. You will listen to other people, through documentaries and interviews. Like the weathered father on that Al-Jazeera documentary narrating how he now searches for his son, fearing the young man has returned to Somalia to join the Al Shabaab. You wonder how that man could stand by and allow his child be radicalized. Your own parents would have slapped sense into you. With each story, you read or listen to, you questioned how whole groups of people reach that point. You know your people have never known true peace but you still wonder how it becomes normal for people to carry such a heavy load of hate such that they consider and commit murder, such that one can blow up themselves for questionable beliefs? How? Unfortunately, fate decides to help you answer these questions through experience, and gives you the recipe for war you didn’t ask for. *** Mix ¾ silent majority propagating stereotypes and fending only for self 2/3 biased media, journalists reporting for sensationalism, the next brown envelope, or to encourage their own faction ½ inadequate education, teach young people dependency but not proactivity, teach youth the parts of a grasshopper but neither the hard truths of their history nor the laws of their country. Leave them grossly uninformed and depending on which region their school is based, leave them to be further socialized with stereotypes. Add a full measure of fear and distrust of the armed forces, be they police, army or everything in between. Let that fear seep so deep into their hearts and do nothing to erase it. Add tribalism, corruption, religious dogma, and let these mature under an oppressive government with power-drunk, short-sighted stooges of neo-colonialists who would rather repress than dialogue Sprinkle a dash of social media power to inflate everything, and spread incomplete news faster… And there you have it, the perfect conditions for war. *** You were not wrong when you thought Hotel Rwanda was incomplete. No film could capture it all. Wars are like wine; they mature over time but pop out as spontaneously as harmattan rain. The screenwriters had to leave the rest to the imagination or to experience. You are discovering now that it begins slowly, with years of grumbling and anger accumulating, hoarded like an abscess left to fester till it bursts open with an accidental scratch. War began when your aunty was mocked for marrying “Les Bamenda la”. It began when going to French areas became synonymous with going to the metropolis and returning to Anglophone areas was synonymous with rural living. War grew in our hearts when we would go on long holidays to French areas and count how often the power went off, noting that it was less frequent than the times it went off back ‘home’. The seeds of war were sown unwittingly when you soaked in your grandparent’s disdain for all things French such that boycotting French lessons didn’t faze you. You were allowed to fail that subject. No one would question it. War spread as we grew, grew older, and grew tired, as our government didn’t even bother to pretend any longer. As our president would patronize with statements like “apprenti sorcier” referring to protesters, or “better late than never” as an excuse for and tardy celebration of independence and presumed unity. And this is how war began; like a belch after you’ve eaten too much. Taken too much nonsense. Nonsense like regional balance which somehow is always unbalanced. Nonsense like regular news broadcasts which omit the hard truths, twist the soft ones and butcher the language of the minority- news that is ironically old no matter the presenter. Nonsense like government appointments comparable to a game of musical chairs. We all have a chance to sit and eat, then shuffle dance to get another chance. Nonsense like tens of millions disappearing, stolen, they say, from ministers’ homes as though they were national bank vaults. Too much nonsense like fifty thousand people registering to write entrance exams where only two hundred and fifty are needed. A veritable lottery. The battleground was slowly built but the war has been quickly called. As swiftly as the arbitrary arrests of January 17th, 2017. When all of a sudden those who would answer bullets with sit-in protests were replaced with those who could actually wield machetes if given. Now you can tell that war is not a fire, but a bar of soap, able to hold still when dry, but ready to slip out of grasp when lathered. And governments like yours would lather, throw water saying “It is nothing. They will return to court when they are hungry”, “There is no Anglophone problem”…“Those people protesting are terrorists”… and so the foam will build and you will see war tumbling towards you like the unwieldy soapsuds. Yet not everyone will see it. It is funny like that. Soap lathers silently, so it is that war encroached silently, with people accepting the bubbles as the norm. War grows unto people. They begin to take cases of vengeful arson in stride, they make excuses for journalist calling for massacres, they defend all the wrong means using the desired end, even it the desire is hazy. War foams slowly with adaptation to over-militarisation, with alternatives found to ‘inconveniences” like opening up shops on Sundays and sending your kids to other towns for schools. Like securing visas to travel; let those who are poor and unable to leave remain to die. You see now that this is how it starts, the wars you read about, watched
Takeaways from ‘The Struggle’
I recently wrote a piece for This is Africa on the lessons my experience of living under the Internet ban left me with. You can read the piece here The internet ban was just a fraction of this protest, however. This ‘struggle’ which has gone on for over seven months experience has marked me in more ways than I can express. I am sure it has marked others just as much if not more. As I noted takeaways from the internet ban I considered other lessons this experience in its entirety should have taught us collectively as Cameroonians. This experience; the loss, the violence, the rifts, the ignorance, and crookedness it has exposed should be at the very least a learning experience. It should above all else challenge us to address things we let slide before, contributing factors to our current predicament we often overlooked. Consider our Police…. For one, I hope Cameroonians now see the need to focus on the way we recruit our police and jailers. I hope we now find ourselves discontented at the common notion that if you are slow at school, unable to make it to university it is best to bribe your way into the police force for that government matricule. We regular send our least accomplished, our most unstable, school bullies and least learned people to be trained to enforce the laws of our society; how does that make sense? How then can we complain about police brutality? What do we expect given the crop we send there? The majority of those signing up for a life of ‘law enforcement are barely in it for love of law, our police are there for the regular pay, the potential abuse of power, the government matricule… so how then do we expect that these people be relied on to serve us in time on emergency? As though that isn’t enough, have we considered how they are trained? Stories of shaved heads, gruesome physical and verbal abuse during police and gendarme training regularly trickle out; we hear them and shrug. We mutter “hmmm” clap our hands or say ‘ashia’ in case we’re chanced to hear those who experienced it tell the story firsthand. But have we considered how the inhumane training process is for gendarmes, BIR, police, and wardens affect their performance? I have witnessed ENAP- Prison wardens newly admitted welcomed like criminals of war at their training institute. Following such ‘training’ how do we then expect them to act humanely to actual prisoners? Hopefully, this experience has highlighted that we need to train better police to be able to believe in law enforcement. As of now, I doubt a Cameroonian child would opt to go to the police for security reasons. Civic ignorance is a breast lump… Civic ignorance is one of our greatest threats. For democracy to work you need informed people. A government for the people, by the people, is only as great as the people themselves are. After months of seeing fellow citizens “just discover” historical ‘secrets’ they should know for fact, I pray we have established that we as a nation need to do better in terms of civic education. It is unthinkable that so many of the younger generation know so little of our own history and what little some know is further tainted and distorted to fit certain stereotypes passed on by parents and regional groups. If Cameroon as a whole cannot teach its combined history to its entire population, how then do we expect to ever be on the same footing, building a future together? It should be unheard of that a Cameroonian knows the second in command of American and French political parties but is uncertain of who is next in line to succeed their own president. A great deal of misinformation during this crisis succeeded primarily because people of both educational systems are so lacking in knowledge of common historical events, lacking in knowledge of political processes, our laws, and rights. People have readily spread rumors of the United Nations doing what that international body has little authority to do, and with every Facebook and WhatsApp share it has become someone’s version of the truth. We literally have grown folks citing Facebook posts as sources like some ignorant undergrads cite Wikipedia. You may be thinking: of course, it is a conspiracy by the government to keep us ignorant blah blah blah. But nope, that doesn’t cut it. We need to take an adequate share of responsibility for our ignorance. This level of ignorance isn’t a result one party’s doing. It’s like a breast lump left unchecked. We all have a hand in this one. You sanctioned ignorance when you gave your child pocket money to go spend on the on 11th February last year without them knowing why they were marching in the first place. We all want to claim injustice this year and denounce these events, what were we doing last year? I was on the field last year to question people on the purpose behind 11th February celebrations, the responses were terrible! See videos here. We allowed this ignorance to build to this point where is has- like spittle spat above our heads- come down to foul our faces. Our collective ignorance has been highlighted in neon green during this protest and if we can as a nation take away one thing from this experience, I hope that is the need to address civic ignorance. We often brush away our lack of interest in knowledge of our country with statements like “why you wan know sef, the whole country is trash”. I can’t sigh enough at this. We need to know so we can properly criticize the ‘trash’. We need to know so we can address the trashy parts or don’t we want it fixed? If we fail to address our ignorance today as a people, we should be ready to have it used against us in the near future. Finally, the time is