A discourse on how my country became a complicated place to live in

In my country, the curfew’s eight P.M, even the rats know this. Step out after this and you are dead meat. No, dead grilled meat.

In my country, you are always a stray bullet away from seeing God, from basking in his heavenly bossom and saying “Father, how good it feels to be home.”

In my country, you are always a word away from being lynched(Ambazonia), Five thousand Francs away from being jailed for leaving your house to buy bread without an identification card.

In my country, armies have flooded the streets, ghosts lurk in the shadows, danger looms on the horizon. Fear has sunk its claws deep into the heart of the people, and acrimony, like cataract, has blinded us.

In my country, empathy has become a rare currency only those with boundless reserves of love can afford. Because family and friends must come first.

In my country, peace is just another borrowed word which is yet to find meaning in our dictionary.

But my country was not always like this. We were once a free people — a happy one. We walked the streets of Molyko like we owned it, and we did. Our schools teemed of youthful exuberance — of brilliance — of a generation which hold better dreams for the future than we did.

I can’t quite say how this begun, or how my country became this amorphous landscape I now live in. Some things are complicated to explain: like waking up to find yourself taller, like childhood friends becoming strangers, like the sun shining when it’s raining, like singing in the shower, like bitting your tongue while eating, like waking up to find the place you once called home a war zone.

When feelings are involved and people are hurt, when the heart breaks, and the eyes weep — everything changes — becomes complicated.

What started out as a mere ultimatum by lawyers and teachers to government rapidly morphed into a strike, then a political tussle, then a silent civil war, then a genocide, then something between a nightmare and a living hell.

This is my account of how my country became a complicated place to live in.

October 2016, teachers and lawyers of Anglophone Cameroon make demands to the government which are not met. The result is boycott. Teachers in unison with lawyers decide to boycott work. In a matter of weeks, schools shut down, students stay home with their parents, beer sells more because people have more time to drink, and other businesses are affected.

Your sister calls you daily to gist you on the happenings back home. She left Buea the second week of the strike because classes were inconsistent. You live in a French part of the country, so your studies are not affected by the strike.Classes intensify: assignments, evaluation, outdoor interviews… you wish you schooled in an Anglophone university so you could be home resting, you wish you could swap places with your sister.

Before long, you stop hearing about lawyers and teachers. Only of separation. You read that Anglophones want to secede from Francophones and create an independent state as it was in the yesteryears. You read that markets are on lockdown, that taxi drivers and motorbike riders have joined the struggle. Temerity or is it patriotism leads youths to the street. They march in protest of the current regime, “give us federation or separation” they chant.

Your friends have become more caring these days. They write to check up on you like hourly. People you stayed months without exchanging 'hello’s’ with have now become besties. You know it’s not really care, they just have too much free time, but you appreciate the gesture. They remind you how fortunate you are to be schooling in a Francophone zone, they tell you to keep schooling but just know that your certificate will be useless in this part of the country and Internationally because UNESCO or some other stooge international organization said so. You nod in agreement, when the call ends, you grab your hand-outs and study even more fiercely.

Before long, you start hearing of deaths: “three persons killed in a confrontation with the military,” “Two persons wounded in Fiango,” “Ten arrested at Mundemba,” “School’s burnt down in Bamenda, shops burnt down….”

You tell yourself that this would pass. You tell yourself it would soon end because no father can watch his house crumble in chaos and do nothing. You tell yourself your president would nip this in the bud. You tell yourself the world has become globalized, the media has eyes everywhere, the people can not be brutalized.

You soon find out you are wrong. That there’s such a thing as State sovereignty, as non-interference in internal affairs. You learn the government can do as it pleases and the world would only watch from the fence, throwing sad glances, feigning interest.

February 2017

You are home on a self-proclaimed holiday. You arrive Bamenda on a Saturday, and make plans to get some things done in town on Monday. You have some documents to print and others to scan. You have a deadline in four days.

On Monday morning, you rise with the sun, hit your keyboard frantically to complete the five pages you still had to type. You curse the freezing water as you bathe, towel off and jump into a trouser and t-shirt.

“Mah, I’m going to town,” you say to your mother. “What for?” she asks. When you tell her, she sniggers. She tells you there’ll be ghost town from Monday to Wednesday and asks you to drop your bag and help her pick beans to be cooked as the day’s meal.

This would be your first experience of a ghost town. Ad nauseum, you’d move down the road to confirm that cars didn’t really move, to ensure stalls were truly locked. Your mom asks if you came to Bamenda on a secret mission, why in God’s name are you patrolling cars? You giggle. This woman cannot understand the importance of witnessing a ghost town first hand, seeing it with your own eyes, feeling it in your skin.

You are marvelled by the silence that sweeps through your neighborhood despite everyone’s being at home. You idle about the house, join your brother in his room, but he is too busy with his phone. Your sister is probably at her friend’s, your mother walks about the house, doing those self-created chores mothers like to do. Cleaning things that look sparkly to you, putting perfectly arranged things in order. By Wednesday, you wish you never came home, ghost towns have ghosted out every bit enthusiasm in you.

You begin questioning the struggle, its purpose, its strategy.

You travel back to school. Your hostel has an equal number of Anglophone and Francophones. You and your Anglophone comrades begin having quotidian morning debates about the strike. Most of you think dialogue is the solution. You agree that the struggle has crumbled the economy, things are getting harder by the day. “ We watch our allowances dwindle every month, we are tired of eating rice.” Sandra your hostel friend says tersely.

One of the guys in your hostel thinks the struggle should be crushed, he says Anglophones have lost their minds. They are nothing without Francophones, like omelette is nothing without egg. You tag him a black leg; a betrayal to the course. You name him Judas Iscariot, then later, Atanga Nji Paul.

The internet is shutdown in Anglophone regions for the second time. The first lasted about two to three months? You did not keep track. Institutions that are web-based have been paralyzed, queues are visible in banks because there’s no internet to sort things out faster. Students move to nearby French regions for internet access to complete their projects, scammers migrate to Internet -Cameroon to continue their fleecing.

Your friends keep telling you how lucky you are to be schooling in the French part of the country, how you are not affected, how you are fine. As if you had suddenly gained a different identity, as if living in another town robbed you off your personality, as if the assassinations didn’t hurt you too, as if seeing your cousin’s and friends idling home was a sight to behold.

It annoyed you that they monopolized the problem, perceived it as theirs only. Placed you out of a bubble which you are inherently part of.

Sunday October 1St 2017

You are home in Bamenda. You slept off deleting messages from friends, relatives, anonymous people… warning you to stay indoors. They say you should stock up enough food in the house because Sunday could change the history of the country for good. You wonder why you should bother buying food when choppers fly so close to the ground you’d think they’d drop a bomb on your roof any moment as you’ve watched countlessly in movies.

It’s an unusually calm Sunday. You say an unusual prayer: God help me to accomplish my dreams before I leave this Earth, help me to love before I leave this Earth, help me to make this world a little better than I met it before I leave, help me to live fully and truly before I leave this Earth, help me Lord. Please protect my family and I today, protect us all…Amen. When you open your eyes, you feel a rush of freedom, you imagine the suprise on God’s face listening to such a request. You have never prayed like this before, Heaven should know there’s a problem.

Your are seated on the verandah, hands over your knees, filing your toe nails when your mom leaves the house accompanied by your brother. She says they want to get Ibuprofen from a nearby pharmacy. As they walk down the road, a military truck pulls over to them. They speak in French, order your brother to climb in to the truck with them. He resists, they grow impatient, drag him to the truck. Your mom in distress pleads, she cries, wails. She says they were only going to get a drug, they mean no harm, they are mere civilians. They hesitate a moment. When she speaks to them in French, they seem to be touched, your brother is let go.

When your mom comes home, she is a different woman. Different from the one who chattered heartily with your brother moments ago. She has a look akin to what she wore when your father passed. It broke you to see her like that. Too distraught to recount what had happened, she swallowed her words. Your brother, seemingly unscathed, told you what transpired.

You grief at the possibility of what could have been, of your brother sleeping in a cold cell with strangers, of the dreadful things that could happen there. You grief for the families who have lost loved ones in the struggle. You grief for the unaccounted people, for the mother who knows not the whereabouts of her son, for your friend’s uncle who had been arrested and transferred to yaounde — for his wife and two year old daughter. You grief for businesses that have crumbled, schools that have been reduced to ashes, youths who have lost interest in education.

You go into your room and gather the pieces of your broken heart in a bucket. You let tears flow down your cheeks freely. You weep for all the times you have been treated as a second class citizen in a country that was yours, you weep at how your lecturer had applauded your bilingualism, nudging you to keep English aside and speak French more if you wanted to make it in the country. You close your eyes and tell yourself it is well.

Thursday May 31st 2018

It’d soon be two years since this struggle or craze begun and it’s become more complicated than algorithm. You’ve seen the unseen and heard the unheard. You have watched mass assassinations in Pinyin, Bafut, Bello, mamfe…etc

You don’t know what suprises tomorrow hold, you don’t know what may happen.

You want to pray to the universe to render justice to this situation, but you remember that he who goes to equity must go with clean hands.

You remember that your hands are dirty — they have been soiled by the inquities of the radicalized people. You remember that your people have pushed the military to extremes too. You remember that their activities are illegal.

You close and eyes and wish it were all dream. You hope it dies away with May, you hope tomorrow, June 1st, tells a new story — that of a secure happy people. You hope the voice of your mom on phone tomorrow brings you good tidings — tells you all is well in town.

I have a fondness for words written and spoken. I live and write from Bamenda - Cameroon