The war in Iraq. Before it ever began it was being pushed, launched like a new product. In the drinking dens and squares of Douala, in the markets and business meetings people were talking of nothing else. The place was seething with speculation, some pretty wild: Who does Bush think he is to tell another elected head of state to pack his bags? How can Bush override the UN and just declare war against another sovereign state? What on earth is Tony Blair getting out of it? Have the English socialists, so popular in Africa, finally lost their heads? The Arabs will show them. At last Bush is going to teach Saddam a lesson.
Even women, who tend to hold back when it comes to politics or international affairs, were passionately engaged; gossip gave way to war talk; they kept speaking in pidgin English rather than their local languages.
The children were at it too. My six year old told me that her schoolfriends kept hurrying home to watch the war on telly. Rumour (the second information channel in Cameroon, after the television) had it that a couple had come to blows about this war; that the husband left his wife for another woman over it.
This media war blocked out the pain of surviving from day to day.
The notorious drinking dens of the shanty towns, refuge of strikers and the unemployed, were buzzing with life from dawn till dusk thanks to cable TV. This media war blocked out the pain of surviving from day to day.
As soon as fighting started, Cameroonians of all ages, literate and not, lived with their ears glued to the radio, eyes locked onto television and in the shanty towns they do both at the same time. When people are at work, radio regains the place it lost to television a decade ago. As for the local newspapers the Messenger, New Expression, Cameroon Post, Mutations, The Post and the pro-government Cameroon Tribune the Iraqi crisis fills the pages of them all.
Once the first bomb fell on Baghdad, mass disapproval set in; solidarity with the Iraqi people; a stand against Bush, American imperialism, the American way of life. Why turn such powerful, sophisticated weaponry on a country already on its knees, beggared by two deadly wars, ruined by twelve years of economic embargo? Why allow Iraq to be disarmed by UN Resolution 1441, only then to be attacked? Israel has never respected UN resolutions, and it has never been bothered.
From day to day in Cameroon people live braced for bad news the death of their young ones from illness or a car crash. But, to the vast satisfaction of those in power, the news from Iraq drowned out problems of survival and poverty. The distant land of Iraq has become close, very close, to peoples hearts.
Warning to the West
In the speech he gave after 11 September 2001, George W. Bush declared: I am shocked that people can misunderstand so badly what it is that our country represents. I cant believe that people can really hate us. Because we are a good country. In Africa, this good country has been shown up. Because it became rich through aggression, through impoverishing others.
You who are the objects of so much bitterness, of hatred even, are you really unaware of the impact of your actions? Many here, the young above all, believe that they have been sacrificed. By whom? Why?
- Here, farmers cant find a fair price for their goods, because of speculation on Londons stock exchange.
- Here, poverty is the reason why children drop out of school. According to the magazine The Messenger, of every 1000 children who enter nursery school, ten will finish secondary school, and less than four will go on to university.
- Here, little children are dying every day of illnesses which it would have cost less than five euros to treat. Their parents are too poor to afford the prices charged by multi-national drug companies, backed by IMF rules that benefit only rich countries.
If our planet is ever to see that liberty, equality and fraternity which you rich countries taught us to value, you urgently need to learn to live with the rest of us. Otherwise this Anglo-American belligerence will breed the same resistance from Africa that it has from Latin America. How many more times does history need to teach you that poverty leads to violence?
