Mayday

Despite its financial crisis, the whole of the council went to Yagoua, capital of the district which includes Maga, to march in the Mayday parade. I went with them, decked out in Cameroonian dress. Transport was in the back of a truck but after I had climbed into it, hitting my head off an iron bar in the process, the mayor fished me out and told me I was to go in his 4X4. He did not come with us since his mother had died and he was in mourning. Even in the 4X4 it was an arduous journey. I am repeatedly surprised by roads even worse than those I have been on. To make matters worse, there had been rain earlier which turned the road into mud, and at times the 4X4 skated all over the road which had a significant drop on each side.

The 80 kilometer journey was interesting since it followed the Logone south for most of the way (in the northerly direction the road goes around 200 kilometers to Kousseri, which is across the river from Njamena, the capital of Chad). There was good vegetation, due to the river, and the recent rains had begun to produce some patches of green. There were places where we could see people wading back and forth between Chad and Cameroon. A friend told me that she was washing clothes in the Logone one day and a man whom she knew waded across from Chad. He was well dressed but just waded to whatever depth was necessary. When he saw her he borrowed her soap and soaped both himself and his clothes, remaining fully clothed. He then rinsed off and continued on his way, letting the sun dry him.

Yagoua turned out to be quite a nice town with lovely trees and some small hills (a rarity in the flat Logone plain). Before the parade started there was some entertainment. At one stage a senior council official with whom I have a lot of dealings took me by the hand to see some traditional dancers. He pulled me through the crowd towards the front and continued to hold my hand as we watched. Homosexual acts are illegal in Cameroon but it is quite common for men to hold hands. Despite this, I felt ill at ease and in order to disengage I decided to take a photo. After taking the photo I was slow to put my hand back down since I was afraid that he would grab it again. When I finally put my hand down I found that my wallet was gone. In addition to my money and my bank cards (with which I had completely failed to access money in Cameroon) it contained an identity card which I had been issued after arrival. Being without this card is a serious matter since it creates circumstances in which policemen look for significant bribes. Another member of the Maga party who was watching the dancers had his mobile phone stolen.

We went to the local police station and reported the theft. They told me that my wallet would probably turn up but without my money. Cameroon has a benevolent type of pick-pocket who, provided that the wallet contains enough money, actually throws the wallet through the window of the police station at night. I got a phone call from the Yagoua police to-day to say that this has duly happened and that the wallet contains my indentity card.

The parade, when it finally took place, was a farce. We marched no more than 300 metres in the space of a few minutes. However a few of us piled into the 4X4 and joined a cavalcade of similar vehicles which formed a sort of secondary parade around the streets of Yagoua, much to the glee of the local children.

As usual, I was one of a privileged few who were invited to lunch by a local person who turned out to be a most agreeable and thoughtful host. He was very interested in where I was from and produced an atlas so that I could show him where Ireland is and what countries I had flown over when going to Cameroon.

Democracy, Cameroonian Style

The president of Cameroon is Paul Biya. He has been in power for 25 years, is 75 years old and has recently changed the constitution to enable him to stay in office for a further term. Announcement of this change was the spark that ignited the riots which caused our departure to Cameroon to be delayed, although there were already many underlying sources of grievance, including huge increases in food and fuel prices. The Government puts the number of deaths in the riots at 40 but NGOs say that the real number is greater than 100. I have heard it remarked that Biya wants to stay in office since he would be jailed for embezzlement if he resigned. There was a census in Cameroon in 2004 and the results have not yet been published – some allege that this is because its publication would make the rigging of elections more difficult.

Cameroon has an elected parliament and has provision for a senate but this has not been implemented. Parliament can make laws but many of them are ignored. The prime minister and all ministers are appointed by the president and don’t need to be members of parliament. The president also appoints the people who head up Cameroon’s 10 provinces, and these people have much more power than government ministers, the latter mainly filling an advisory and standard setting role. There is a cascade of appointments from provincial to divisional, sub-divisional, district and council level. The Sous-Préfet is at council level and is the most powerful person at that level. The councillors are elected and they in turn elect the mayor. The mayor appoints deputies from among the councillors to form his Executive. Apart from this he inherits his management team. There is a Secretary General at council level who is appointed by the Sous-Préfet but is a member of the mayor’s team. In practice he is the most powerful person on the mayor’s team, and there are a number of other state appointments on the mayor’s team. Thus the mayor needs to achieve things by influencing rather than by authority. Laws providing for decentralisation of responsibilities were published in 2004 but they have not been enacted, and a further law which is to provide for transfer of resources to councils to enable them to fulfil the new responsibilities has not yet been published. Thus councils are in the invidious position of being expected by their electorate to provide water, schools, health centres, roads and many other services but they don’t have the means to provide them. Meanwhile the state is not filling this gap. Maga’s 41 councillors are all from the opposition party. This is a result of a weird system where each party puts forward a list of candidates and the electorate vote for the lists. Maga’s councillors feel that they are marginalised by the state (ironically, in one of the villages that I visited the chief and his notables were government supporters and felt marginalised by the council).

The chiefs are traditional leaders from families on which their succession is based. There are lots of princes and princesses. Their local power on issues such as ownership of land cuts across state authority at times. They perform a bottom-up function for the state on matters where consultation is sought and they organise local committees to look after matters such as maintenance of wells and pumps. They also act as tax collectors for the councils and the state. The meeting in the Sultan’s palace referred to earlier was attended by all the chiefs in the area and at the meeting each chief was given pre-signed and pre-stamped receipts for taxes which are levied annually on all adults (around €2 per annum). Police frequently stop people to check on their identity cards and if they don’t have a receipt for tax payment presumably they will have to pay a higher bribe than would otherwise be the case.

Visits to Villages

A man (Moussa) from a local development organisation was doing a survey of deep water pumps in the Maga area and I accompanied him in order to get to know the villages, their chiefs and their needs (Halidou acted as interpreter since practically nobody in the villages speaks French). The night before we started I asked Moussa how he planned to spend the days and he said that he might just work for the morning since it gets extremely hot. He turned up as agreed at 7:00 the next morning and casually remarked that if we went far out into the bush we might not make it back that night. I hastily threw a few things, including a torch and a mosquito net, into a bag and joined him in his 4X4. We visited a lot of villages that day, crossing extremely difficult terrain by following what looked like animal tracks, and ended up in a very remote village where we slept in the open. We hung our mosquito nets from poles that we stuck in the ground and the villagers gave us mats to sleep on. They were not expecting us but killed a chicken and cooked it with rice for us. They also gave us boiled milk straight from the cow. At that stage we had eaten nothing for 14 hours. The next day we visited several other villages but I ran out of filtered water and insisted that we go to Guirvidig to buy some (and some bread for breakfast/lunch). Moussa worked through the week-end and into the next week but at least he agreed to go back to Maga at night.

The deprivation of the villagers is enormous. Most of the deep pumps are broken or working badly. Many villagers are faced with drinking water from shallow, unsafe and unreliable wells or bringing water large distances from other villages. In some cases the villagers, and particularly their children, drink water from ponds and swamps used by livestock. As you go further into the bush the tracks that serve as roads virtually disappear. For several months in the rainy season many villages are completely cut off (even in Maga there are weeks when you can’t go out of your house and when it is impossible to go to a neighbouring village even in a 4X4). The rainy season brings high risk of disease since there are no refuse collection services anywhere and no latrines in many villages, with the result that all sorts of stuff is floating around. There are risks of flooding (I have come to realise that there is also an appreciable risk of flooding in Maga because the ditch of the artificial lake sometimes breaks). Many villages have no school and many of their children never go to school (particularly girls, who have to fetch water and perform other chores), even in the dry season. Where villages have schools, more often than not they have fallen into disuse because the villagers are unable to pay teachers or because the villages are too remote to attract them.

When we were sitting in one village talking to the chief I noticed a large flock of birds flying by. They looked rather like a flock of starlings but the flock was enormous and flew past continuously. It still had not passed when we left, half an hour later. I was told that they were “bêtes” which eat grain. The likelihood is that most of the harvest will be wiped out. The defence against these birds is to spray them at night from a plane in order to exterminate them. The last time that this was done was 2001 and they have since recovered and are now everywhere. The local remedy is to cast nets over trees at night and then bring the birds to Maroua to be eaten, but this makes a trivial impact. The government has put in place a service, including planes, to spray the “oiseaux granivores” but I am told that the resources have been diverted to other, probably private, uses.

Although our arrival was unexpected, large reception parties materialised in most villages. Some came with spears, bows and arrows, swords, machetes, and other weapons. In one village there was a fierce-looking man on horseback with a bow and arrows who offered to bring me riding (which I declined). I asked him what he used the bow and arrows for and he said that they were for defence against bandits and lions. I don’t think that there are lions in the vicinity but in another village later that day we were told how they had killed a bandit with an arrow.

Marriage, Life and Death, Cameroonian Style

Parents here expect their children and grand-children to look after them in old age. They try to have their daughters married from as young as thirteen (for which they receive a dowry) and press them to have as many children as possible, with the result that many girls drop out of school. As far as I can judge, the wives get spent at an early age and the husbands take other wives, also young, retaining or divorcing the former wives. It is not unusual for men in their fifties, and even sixties, to take young wives and to continue to have children. There is a local chief who has 47 children and his sixth wife is currently pregnant. They don’t seem to consider whether they will be able to support the children, but look to the state or council to provide facilities for them. Men also have a lot of extra-marital affairs with “free women” and illegitimate children abound. It does not look as though there is any real bond between husband and wife in most cases, other than contractual.

Part of the logic here is that mortality will be high and that lots of children are needed to provide enough survivors to look after the old. A link does not seem to be drawn between the high birth rate, the lack of capacity of water supply, schools and health facilities, and the general worsening of very impoverished conditions. Illness and death are everywhere here. Within my small circle of friends in the space of a few weeks, there have already been numerous deaths, including children and people of all ages. Most have been caused by malaria, and this is not the bad time of the year (which is from October to December, after the rainy season).

Halidou’s mother fell ill and I went with him to visit her in the Pouss hospital. The hospital can accommodate around 15 patients, has almost no equipment and has only one qualified nurse and no doctor. It serves around 50,000 people, and some Chadians also cross the Logone to go to it. Halidou’s mother seemed extremely unwell and they were unable to diagnose her illness (which turned out to be malaria). I gave him money to have her brought to the Maga hospital, which has some equipment and a doctor, where she was diagnosed and given treatment. She has now recovered but I think she would have died if left in Pouss. All medical treatment has to be paid for and most people cannot afford to pay and just do without it. I have heard many stories of people who have died for lack of money to pay for treatment and medicines (which cost trivial amounts in our terms).

The mother of another friend has been having some sort of fits and she and everybody else thinks that she has been put under a spell by somebody. She probably has something like cerebral malaria but even the best educated people believe in sorcerers. There are of course local “healers” with dubious methods.

The bonds between parents and children are also weak in many cases. Children are left to roam unsupervised, and with no rubbish collection service they are constantly sifting through bags of decaying material, some of which they eat. On one occasion I tried to burn some rubbish but did not do a good job and decided to let the fire smoulder and then dispose of it. Later I heard a sound outside my window and saw three young children (less than four years old) at the spot where there had been the decaying remains of fish and other food, but there was none left. Not surprisingly, child mortality is very high. Apart from illnesses, accidents are frequent. In the past few weeks two children have drowned in the lake, another has had his foot crushed while trying to catch onto the side of a truck and another broke both his wrists in a fall from a tree after he was attacked by bees.

There is currently a financial crisis in the Council and employees have not been paid for five months. Nearly 100 employees are affected (including teachers and others employed by the council) and several have told me that they go for days without eating. Most have families, the average size being around 10. When some food is available, the father gets first call, then the mother and then the children, if any is left.

Pictures of Some Friends

Neighbours and Friends

The people here are very friendly, rather like Irish people in rural areas, and I am gradually getting to know some neighbours. Apart from an existing volunteer, Ruth, who has been extremely helpful, my first contact was with a sixteen year-old boy, Kalifa, who introduced himself on my first morning. He told me that he used to act as “petit frère” to the volunteer who was in my house before me. He is very resourceful and street wise, he has fixed all sorts of things for me, sorted out all sorts of problems and has even shown me how to cook a number of local dishes. He is one of a number of youths who tend to turn up at my house around meal times. In Cameroon, no matter how little you have for a meal, if anybody turns up you share it with them. I am quite happy to share but I keep finding that my provisioning and shopping schedule are derailed and I seem to have to go shopping at least once a day. Some of my neighbours and colleagues have invited me to dine with them. In one case a man whom I had met in the town invited himself to dinner one evening, offering to bring cooked fish if I would prepare a salad to go with it. It turned out a very pleasant evening.

Ruth teaches English in a local school and I asked her if she could suggest somebody who could give me some French conversation practice. She introduced me to Halidou, a 30-year old man who teaches French in the local school. This has turned out to be a significant breakthrough. He is very intelligent and speaks not only French and English but several local languages, including Fulfulde, Mousgoum and Arabic Choa. In my first two weeks at work I visited the chiefs of around 50 villages in the area and most of them do not speak French (none speak English). Halidou, who is employed by the council but is seconded to the school, came with me (it was during the school holidays). He was able to fill me in on the background to everything, as well as translating. He is some sort of national volunteer and is paid very little and treated badly. Cameroon’s graduates, of whom he is one, find it extremely difficult to get work and one option for them is to work as a volunteer and at least get experience. Last week-end he got engaged. For years his parents have been pressing him to marry but he resisted up to this. He finally gave in and consented to meet a 17 year old girl at their request. He met her for the first time on Saturday, got on well with her and agreed to marry her.

I have scripted a play for a workshop which I need to run with all the councillors and with the local dignatories. A local group of actors have agreed to do it for me and they come to my house to rehearse. They are young, energetic and talented. Their main strength is improvisation, which is not good news for me since I am trying to communicate particular messages and I never know when they are going to take off at a tangent and abandon the script. One of them is referred to as “Princess Diana”, being a princess herself (this distinction is not what it seems since the chiefs tend to have so many children). There are some original names here: one very assidous student at the local school is referred to as “A-B-C-D”.

The mayor has introduced me to all the important people in the area. These are a mixture of elected representatives, such as the mayor and his executive, state-appointed representatives, of whom the Sous-Prefet is the most important, and traditional chiefs, of whom the Sultan of Pouss is the most senior. The latter has an impressive palace in Pouss as well as a house in Maga. The mayor brought me to the palace in Pouss on the first day and after we had taken our shoes off we were brought into a very large room with sofas around it and carpets on the floor. When the Sultan entered with his retinue we bowed respectfully and all conversation was restrained and at his bidding. He is extremely tall, as are most of the Mousgoum tribe of which he is part. The mayor sat under him and talked up to him, and on subsequent visits to the palace the only person who sat at his level was the Sous-Prefet. On one occasion there were around 50 men in the room and a select few, including myself, were invited to lunch with him (lovely beef, lamb, chicken and fish, plus vegetables and sauces). He turned out to be quite genial. He took pity on my efforts to eat with my hands sitting on the floor (the Cameroonian way of eating), without staining the carpet and my clothes, and he produced two chairs – one for me to sit on and the other to use as a table. I was quite embarrassed but it seemed to amuse him, and of course all the others. Ruth lives in his Maga house and shares a lovely big living room. He has frequently asked her to become his sixth wife, which she has declined. His fifth wife, who was 14 and was an “esclave” since his religion only permits four wives, ran away, causing a scandal. He has also offered to marry Ruth to one of his sons.

No smoking, spitting, fighting, stealing or vomiting on the bus

This was the notice above the windows of a minibus which I took from Maga to Guirvidig on the latter’s market day. The bus only leaves when it is full, which means that an incredible number of people are packed in, and there are others on the top and also hanging out of the back (on the way back from the market there is all this plus all sorts of bulky objects bought at the market piled high on top). People sit facing each other in rows along the length of the bus and their knees are carefully interleaved with no room left to move in. A boy near me had a cock in his lap which tried frantically to escape every now and then. As we sat sweltering in the heat waiting for the bus to leave (this can take hours) somebody’s mobile played “Jingle Bells”.

I was at the front of the bus and could see into the cab (which contained three people in addition to the driver). The seat of the cab opened up to reveal the engine. Before starting, the driver connected some wires, put water in the radiator and sucked some liquid through a tube into his mouth, spat it out and syphoned the liquid into something else. After all that the battery barely turned the engine, which would not start, and then the guys hanging out of the back of the bus pushed it (fully loaded) until it started. The gear changes were incredibly jarring. I soon came to realise that the bus had absolutely no brakes and on one occasion a car blocked the way and for what seemed like an eternity the bus free-wheeled up to it and bumped into it. The driver didn’t even get out to see if there was any damage. We passed some police sitting under a tree and free-wheeled to a stop down the road from them. The driver gave some money to one of the guys hanging out of the back who ran back and gave it to them, presumably to avoid having his vehicle checked for road-worthiness. Most buses that I have been in since then have been equally bad and have had theirs radiators topped up every 15 kilometers or so. Broken down buses are regular sights, their passengers sitting patiently under a tree. I was on a bus recently which broke down over ten times between Maroua and Maga. Each time repairs were done with the help of bits of tubing, plastic bags, etc. To my relief the bus eventually made it to its destination, albeit many hours late.

The state of everything here is precarious. To-day I was in the local chief’s house and a young boy took out a bicycle. The chief asked him if it was road-worthy. The boy said “yes” but immediately the front wheel fell off and then the handlebars also fell off.

Pictures from Maga

Since I wrote my blog on Maga I have been out on the lake and have seen the hippos. It was a lovely still day and it has left a lasting impression on me. I felt privileged.