In the Beginning…

When and where did everything start? And what are your earliest memories?

I was born in 1954 in southern Cameroon, in other words not in my parents’ home region. One of my earliest memories is the school at the Catholic Mission right by where we lived, and the colonial administrator, whom we used to see at Mass. On the one side there were the Whites, and on the other the Blacks. Everything was divided, separate. It was the colonial era.

I also remember on 1 January 1960 when we went to parade, our chests puffed out, singing that national anthem with its terrible words: ‘O Cameroon, birthplace of our ancestors, before you lived in barbarity. Like a sun you start to shine, little by little emerging from your savagery…’ I remember thinking that the barbarity was the colonial period, but no! What's more, coming via my parents from the West of Cameroon where the war of liberation was still raging at the time, there were a whole load of things that were said at the time about the struggle, about the repression of the UPC [Union of the Peoples of Cameroon], there were the underground fighters’ decapitated heads that the authorities exhibited at the entrance to villages to create a state of terror. Villages that the French army dropped Napalm on … All this was taking place during my childhood.

I remember travelling to my parents’ home region in Western Cameroon. It was awful: every time we reached a police or military barrage, we all had to get out of the bus. All the adults were made to sit on the ground while the police searched completely brutally, treating our parents with contempt. It was the same contempt that we met with in our local districts. At times, the police and/or the army would decide to lock down a district. They called it ‘the curfew’. They would encircle the neighbourhood, force all the men out and sit them at the crossroads while they searched all the houses. So, there was constantly this terrible sense of humiliation in our parents’ eyes, and I can say in all honesty today a feeling of submission that was passed on to us children.