explaining Cameroon

Last Sunday, I barely got my blog posts up because local internet connections had gone all wonky. Apparently, there were problems across the entire country. Today’s Cameroon Tribune (the “official” newspaper) explained why. It seems that Camwater (the national water agency) was working on river canalization in the area of Wouri. While digging, they hit—and in fact completely severed—the fiber optic cable laid by Camtel (the national telecommunications agency), which is the SINGLE physical carrier for all internet traffic in the country. Thus, in one slip of the backhoe, Cameroon went offline.

This is all starting to seem par for the course. Being here has really reinforced how much I take for granted in my life. It has not, sadly, made me any more patient and laissez-faire about things; I think that would require me staying longer. And having fewer time and budgetary constraints, which make all setbacks that much more annoying.

In the grand scheme of things, though, utility outages are the least of peoples’ worries here. It’s odd. Cameroon in some ways feels far more functional to me than Nigeria did, in spite of having a much smaller per capita GNP. There are visible material iniquities, but they’re not quite as stark. And day to day life continues. People go out, they buy and sell things, they listen to music and hang out in bars and restaurants. They dress well: more fashionably (and a bit more revealingly) than people did in Nigeria. They drink more, too. There are flowers growing on the hills and along the roadsides. Generally, life seems less like a war zone in Yaounde then it did in Lagos, and less clinical then it did in Abuja. It basically feels like a “normal” developing country capital. With a very verbal, very active population, that makes the best of some bad situations.

Because, while grinding poverty isn’t as immediately evident in Cameroon as it was in Nigeria, people still have to put up with a lot. The thing that bothers me most—unsurprisingly, probably—is the fact that opportunity isn’t tied to skill and effort. You can be the smartest, hardest working kid in your class and still get passed up for higher education, because you don’t have the right connections. While your classmate who doesn’t even bother to take his exams gets admitted to med school, because his father or uncle knew someone higher up.

It kills me, to hear those stories. Which I do, quite frequently. I feel angry, and frustrated, and experience a kind of survivors’ guilt at having been so incredibly lucky in the national identity lottery. What do you do when someone wishes aloud that they were American, like you?

I try to listen, and internally vow to work that much harder, to take advantage of the opportunities I have. But I wish I had some better immediate answers. Sadly, I don’t see the socio-economic situation here changing any time soon. Cameroon is basically in political stasis; they’ve had the same leader for 26 years. And while there is an opposition party and some critical journalism, no one can go very far afield without being punished. Elections are “democratic” in name only. Which means there’s no accountability, and little incentive for anyone to change the system, even if they had the capacity, which they don’t. No wonder people seem resigned.

Ugh. I wish I could end this post on a more positive note. At least violence is low? And they’ve avoided coups and outright civil war? Given the experiences of other Central African countries, that might count for something.