Around June 9th- Some weird things and Jupiter Night Club

In the mornings around 9:00 Aya, Laura, and I head to work. We walk to the end of our long muddy road, through a nice little middle-class neighborhood (which is uncommon- middle class is almost non-existent here in Cameroon) and by the Bee-yah-ka (not sure how it’s actually spelled) nursing school. Beeyahka junction is the place where the big main road meets ours. By big main road I mean a wide single lane road, median, and then another single lane road with traffic flow in the opposite direction. We just have to stand there and then a cab will pull over and you hop in, sometimes sitting on laps, sometimes sitting so close to the stick-shift that you get yelled at when the driver needs to up-shift. A couple mornings ago a cab pulled up to us and there was no way all three of us could fit in so we flagged another one. The second pulled up but the first didn’t move on like we encouraged. Instead the driver of the first started yelling “whites whites” and kicked a passenger out of his cab to make room for all three of us. We probably shouldn’t have gotten in but I think I may have been the only one of the three of us to hear his reason for kicking out the backseat passenger. I was so incredulous that I didn’t bring it up until much later that day. The special treatment and the extra attention is really getting to be too much and it’s actually fatiguing to try to diffuse and ignore it.

Here’s another case. We were leaving the NGO walking towards that same main road after work the same day and a group of guys were just finishing a soccer game. Since we are just on the boundary of campus I was intrigued as to whether it was intramurals or the University of Buea varsity team. Either way, they started yelling hellos at us as we walked by. A bunch of sweaty guys crowded around Aya and I and kept asking for a pen. They were holding plastic orange soccer cleats and trying to give them to us. I said “no thanks” but gave them the Sharpie I had in my bag. Then they gave it back to me and thrust the cleats towards me and kept saying that they wanted my autograph. I broke into laughter and couldn’t see a graceful way out so I slapped a big Kate McDermott on both. The guy told me, “don’t worry, I’m very good.” Phew, glad he’s good.

The last incident: while Bryan was taking my picture by the ocean I noticed there was a group of Cameroonian men crowding around him. They had a talk with him and then he came up to me relaying a message from them. They were wondering if one by one they could get a picture with me. Bryan stressed that it was OK to say no and I probably should have but I have been very worried about seeming snotty, thus misrepresenting Americans as a whole, so I said sure. It’s very hard to know what to do in situations that make you feel like a person in a Cinderella costume at Disney world.

Some of the friends Aya made early on invited us to go dancing with them. We met with them at 11pm and got to the club soon after. It wasn’t what I expected at all. It was a set up so that affordable drinks were served to an audience of live music in the cabaret, and then you could enter the night club. There was a coat check and a few security guards. So far I would say that Jupiter Night Club and Cabaret has been the most well-organized establishment I’ve visited in Cameroon thus far. The dancing was great. I was fully prepared for American hip hop and lots of MJ because that’s what has been blaring out of street-side shops and taxi radios, but I was pleasantly surprised with a majority of Macosa, a genre born in Cameroon similar to jazz but with more African upbeat. It was tricky to dance to though because I think I am usually very influenced by the dancers around me, and the dancing style here is way different than at home. I noticed that the movements are much freer but at the same time really repetitive. My AIESEC friend Eshwa stood in the same spot all night (for more than four hours) and sort of bounced and stepped from side to side the entire time. Very little variation. And that was typical. I had an epiphany though, because at one point in the night they played a really cool tribal song and people did the traditional dance that goes with the tribal song. That dance explained everything. If you’ve ever seen video footage of tribal dances the people were doing something similar, like a stutter step and quick head bobs. It’s really hard to put to words without being able to demonstrate- sorry. For anyone still reading this I salute you for hanging in there. Anyway, it just seemed so cool to me that all the young people in the club are embracing the hip hop of America (which actually was played periodically throughout the night) while loving their roots and dancing with the rhythms and movements ingrained in them by the traditions of their tribes.

The way tribes work, according to Bill (my boss), is as follows: Cameroon has ** provinces and each is divided into something around 13 tribes. Obviously the tribes came first and then had something to do with the way the provinces were divided up, but the German then British and French trumped the chiefs’ preferences. Bill’s dad was a chief in Limbe, and he married a princess from another tribe. Today policies are still made by tribal chiefs as well as city council members and national government people. It sounds as though the chiefs are losing more and more power in decision-making though. But as consolation the cities allow chiefs to keep their royal compounds even if it the city around the compounds wants to infringe. It’s really funny to walk by the chief’s compound in Molyko (the part of Buea where we work and the students’ College Town), because there’s this flag flying high above a little hut of thatch and bamboo, sandwiched between two pretty substantial concrete story buildings. The chief customarily has multiple wives. All the students at The University of Buea belong to tribes located throughout the English-speaking part of Cameroon (so either from the Northwest Province or this, the Southwest Province). Since every student knows English, French, and their tribal tongue, they are all tri-lingual. I take that back- they all know Pigeon English so that makes four languages total. It was really surprising to me that the tribal influences are still so strong even among young people; you’d never know by seeing them or getting to know them that they all so actively maintain traditional ways.