countries, and settling in Europe is nurtured by all youths in Francophone
Africa. Europe is described in geography textbooks and films as the centre of
the world, an El Dorado with a booming economy, as opposed to Africa where
civil wars, famine and generalised underdevelopment are common features.
Unpaved, muddy or dusty African roads are contrasted with paved European
motorways; wooden bridges are contrasted with flyovers, and agricultural production
is contrasted with industrial production. To flee from grinding poverty,
African youths take serious risks to reach Europe, their dreamland. Cameroonian
girls trade their bodies to raise enough money for visa charges. Some spend
their time and their resources consulting internet matrimonial sites in search of
potential husbands whom they do not know. The requirements are sometimes
de-humanising: potential husbands usually ask for enlarged pictures of all of
their would-be wives’ body parts. This requirement has created two new types
of jobs in urban centres in Cameroon: photographers specialised in snapping
specific body parts, and computer operators specialised in scanning these
photographs. These jobs flourished in the country up to the year 2000. In a
personal communication, a cybercafé (shops where internet services are offered
and charged for on an hourly basis) operator told me that he earned his fortune
thanks to women and young girls visiting matrimonial internet sites and
getting their photographs scanned. Some correspondents required as many as
20 photographs of one person’s specific body parts. Needless to say, these photographs
are never given back."
-Jean-Paul Kouega. “The Language Situation in Cameroon.”
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Those rare, brightly lit cybercafés that occasionally dotted the streets of Yaoundé immediately came to mind when I read this article. The thought that such atrocious acts may have been committed as I, an oblivious traveler dazzled by the spectacles of a new environment, so ignorantly passed by makes me shutter. I want to go back. I want to go back not as the naive foreigner again but as someone who has been close enough to hear the heart beat of this country...as someone who walks past the fancy displays in the front of the store and heads to the dusty back shelves to find that which has been left neglected and forgotten.
