Marriages, Births and Deaths

There is considerable activity around marriages, births and deaths here. A man's first marriage is usually arranged by his parents, without consultation, once he is deemed to be in a position to be able to support a family. Some do not seem to mind marrying a girl that they have never met but many men subsequently search out other wives of their own choosing. Marital fidelity is a concept which largely only applies to women since men can flirt with other women (as many of the VSO female volunteers will attest) and then take them as additional wives if they so wish, assuming that they have not opted for monogamy in a civil marriage. Some retain all wives, some divorce the wives that they no longer want and some just abandon them. Under the justice system administered by the traditional chiefs, the father of an abandoned or divorced wife has to return the dowry which he received on her marriage.

Many girls are forcibly married once they reach the age of fourteen or fifteen, often to men in their mid-thirties or older. One of my friends was born to a marriage of a 75 year old man to a 14 year old girl (his fourth wife). This man took another wife when he was 90. Such men are unlikely to survive long enough to feed and educate their children. In one case, where an 85 year old man died leaving a ten year old son, it was suggested that the boy be married to a 14 year old girl and that her education be terminated so that she could earn money to feed him and provide for his education.

In the Far North of Cameroon there is an exceptionally high incidence of VSO volunteers marrying Cameroonians (I won't try to explain this phenomenon!). Many couples settle in the home country of the volunteer after going through the usual visa saga but some prefer to stay in Cameroon. Recently we went to the christening of a baby of an English volounteer who converted to Islam and married a muslim. She is clearly very happy.

When a girl gets married she is expected to have a baby immediately and to continue to have babies in quick succession. Fifteen and sixteen year old girls carrying babies are a common sight (if not fully veiled or confined to their compound) and usually their education has been terminated. This poses a significant problem for them if subsequently they are divorced or abandoned. Some live a life of almost total seclusion, their husbands refusing to let them leave their compound. One of the volunteers working in education organised a committee of mothers of school children. She asked the local chief to encourage the husbands to give them permission to attend meetings. His response was that women should leave their house twice in their lives, once to get married and once to be buried. In less extreme cases, I have frequently found that women invited to social events where alcohol will be available have been denied permission to attend by their husbands. It is not unusual for such husbands to drink alcohol and to turn up with a male drinking companion.

People rationalise their large family sizes on the grounds that many children will die and they will need survivors to look after them in their old age. Recently I went to a funeral of a one year old child of a council colleague. He told me that this was the fifth of his twelve children to die. Having daughters is rewarding because they do a lot of work in the household and they are then married off in return for a dowry, rather like livestock.

Funerals are frequent occurrences here. Some deaths are quite needless. For example, a twenty five year old girl who lived with her uncle while attending university in Maroua died of malaria: the uncle, who is relatively well off, had refused to pay for medicines. Recently a council colleague died, the third among 30 employees in my two years with the council. Usually the burial takes place immediately (because of the heat) and there is a "deuil", or sort of wake, which lasts for at least a week. If it is a Muslim who has died, I can sympathise only with the men, who are usually seated outside the house under a tree or hangar. A recent Christian deuil took that form also but the father brought me into the house to sympathise with his wife. I went to an animist deuil and found that the men and women mixed freely (drinking bilbil, a local brew). The husband had lost one of his six wives and he claimed to have 67 children. One of his wives was again pregnant. He asked me to get my camera and when I brought it he led me outside his compound to show me his wife's grave and then asked me to photograph him on the grave with some of his children.

Limbe and Kribi

Aicha and I travelled south so that she could have treatment for her eye in Douala and because I had a week of meetings in Bamenda in the North West. The trip to the North West was the longest, taking four days from Maga to Bamenda. To get value from travelling we combined the trips with visits to seaside resorts in the South.

Limbe is a resort between Douala and the Bekassi Peninsula. The latter was ceded to Cameroon by Nigeria following a long dispute and is still the subject of armed resistance and also banditry and piratry. Limbe has a scenic coastline with beaches of brown volcanic sand. Our hotel was right on a beach which was almost deserted but the view from the hotel was spoilt by an oil refinery. Limbe has very interesting botanic gardens.

When travelling to Bamenda we stopped off in Yaounde for a couple of days so that I could visit some embassies and orgnisations like UNICEF. While there we visited an art and craft fair where a high proportion of artifacts and of the pople selling them were from Aicha’s native Foumban. One of the more unusual items at the fair was a collection of cakes, one of which depicted Paul Biya, Cameroon’s president for the past 25 years and probably until his death (he is 85), which ba mhaith liom ithe.

After working in Bamenda, which has lovely mountains and a relatively mild climate, we went to Kribi for a few days. Kribi has beautiful beaches which are almost deserted. Fishing is still done from pirogues, boats rather like currachs in the west of Ireland which in this region are constructed from hollowed out tree trunks. We took a trip in a pirogue on a river through the rain forest and visited a pigmy village (at which I felt intrusive and ill at ease) but the vegetation and wildlife along the way were interesting. This river ends in a waterfall which goes directly into the sea. Our hotel in Kribi was again in an idyllic setting on the beach and although we could see an oil or gas rig far out at sea, the view was not spoilt. In both Limbe and Kribi the sea was reasonably clean for swimming.

Moutourwa

One of my volunteer colleagues lives in a village called Moutourwa which is close to some mountains. A group of volunteers visited him for a week-end and he took us for a walk in the mountains. The rock formations were fascinating but the harmattan spoilt the view somewhat. On our way back from our trek we visited a village where we drank a bucket of bilbil, a local brew made from millet.

Winter

There have been many bulletins from Europe about the unusually harsh winter this year, including reports of prolonged freezing spells in Ireland. Cameroon has also experienced unusual weather and many people point to global warming as a cause.

Winter in the Far North of Cameroon runs from December to February. In December the weather was fairly typical, with the temperature very occasionally dropping below 20 degrees early in the morning and usually rising to the low 30s in the afternoon. By the time I went to work the temperature was usually in the low 20s, which I found very pleasant but which the local people found glacial. While I just wore a shirt, they usually had around five layers, including a heavy overcoat and a woolly hat. Some spoke of their hands freezing on their motorbike and many continued to wear their woolly hat even when the temperature climbed into the 30s. Most people suffered from colds and flu, often bringing on a bout of malaria.

In February the temperature climbed steadily and by mid-February it had reached 46 degrees, which is most unusual for that time of year. Happily I had to travel to the mountains of North West Cameroon for a couple of weeks and the climate there is much milder than in the Extreme North. It rained every day while we were there in what should have been their dry season. We had a similar experience when we visited Douala in January, where there was unseasonally heavy rain.

When I returned to the Far North at the beginning of March the temperature was 48 degrees and people told me that it had been even hotter while I was away. It felt as though we were in an oven which was getting ever hotter but then the weather took another unusual turn with the arrival of the harmattan. This is a wind which comes south from the Sahara and which contains huge clouds of dust, perhaps like the cloud currently passing over Ireland and Europe from the volcanic eruption in Iceland but evidently not as damaging to aircraft. With a weak harmattan everything is grey and the sun looks like the moon. This year it got to an intensity which people said they had never seen, the sun was blotted out, it was relatively dark all day and at times everything was in a yellow fog. The harmattan is very unhealthy, bringing on lots of respiratory problems, and it is very unpleasant since the dust gets into everything. It reminded me of the poniente which used to come north from the Sahara when I stayed in Tarifa in the south of Spain. People in Tarifa used to claim that they had the highest level of insanity in Europe and they blamed the poniente.

The harmattan had a positive effect in that it brought the temperature back down. It has passed now and the temperature drops to the low 30s in the morning and rises to the high 40s in the afternoon. Each day is hotter than the one before and the sun will be directly over us at midday around the end of April. There have been no storms yet so the electricity supply has not been cut much, and hence the water supply also (except that local vandals broke a pipe outside my house and it took six weeks to get my supply restored). My humidity guage stops at 20% and since the beginning of November it had only moved above that level for around three days in March when the temperature was soaring. However this week it has risen to around 50% and this has made the heat almost unbearble, compounded by a power and water failure in Maga.

When the first rains arrive there will be a dramatic transformation. Everything will begin to turn green, there will be loud choruses of frogs or toads at night, snakes will appear and mosquitos and hosts of other insects will proliferate.

St. Patrick's Day in Maga

A number of volunteers told me that they were interested in coming to Maga around the middle of March so I consulted with Grahame, the other Irish volunteer, and we decided to celebrate St. Patrick’s day on Saturday 13th March in Maga. We spread the word around and got a very strong response. Over 25 volunteers and their friends came for the week-end, most of them sleeping on the floor of a (carpeted) reception room in the sultan’s Maga house.

Aicha and two of her friends came to prepare the evening meal, bringing large quantities of food from Maroua since very little can be bought in Maga. I travelled with them and I told the other people in the bus that they were my three wives. A friend had promised me a goat so I asked him for it, and in fact he brough a very fine sheep whose throat was duly cut in true Muslim fashion by a couple of my local assistants. I had kept the sheep in an out-house for the night and when I put him in there I discovered a kitten, which I decided to call “Patrick”.

It was a great night. My night watchman took his duties very seriously and weilded a large machete towards anybody he took to be uninvited. Grahame prepared a quiz with questions like “who drove the snakes out of Ireland?”.

Early the next morning I hired two pirogues to bring the volunteers out onto the lake to see the hippos. To my surprise 25 volunteers surfaced on time, maybe because the sultan’s floor was not very comfortable. On the way out we passed a number of large pirogues packed with local people and their produce on their way to the weekly market in Maga. We duly saw the hippos but they stayed down in the water and at a distance. However although I have done this trip a number of times I do not tire of it due to the landscapes, the birds and the flimsy huts built precariously on islands for the fishermen and their families.