Meeting the neighbours
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 20/Oct/2009 11:26, 34 days ago
I’ve been settling in to life in Maga and doing the rounds of various schools, offices, hospitals, and neighbours as I try to get my work moving, traveling round on my slightly fragile mountain bike. Fortunately there are no hills here, as the only way to change gears is to lift the chain manuallyonto the next wheel.I've also met the various dignitaries of the area including the Sultan of Pouss, whose house in Maga I'm living in at the moment. My house itself is round, so all the rooms are very strangely shaped, and has a corridor leading through to the Sultan's reception room (I was disappointed to discover that this only has twelve, rather than the rumoured seventeen, sofas). Although the official administrative power in the region is held by bureaucratic figures such as the mayor and the sub-prefect apparently it is the Sultan, the traditional ruler, who holds the most sway in the reason. He has a prison in his house in Pouss, and is apparently an expert at resolving witchcraft cases. The Sultan himself is extremely tall (approaching seven foot) and very imposing and there was massive excitement when he turned up to visit his Maga house. Villagers flocked to the house, where they come to greet the Sultan and bring him their problems. Despite the twelve sofas only the Sultan himself actually sits on them- everyone else enters, claps three times (or more) and then sits on the floor while they talk to the Sultan. The Sultan has been letting me sit on the sofa next to him, and didn't mind too much when I forgot to clap. He told me that his family had ruled the region, father to brother or son, for 100,000 years. When I asked what happened if the Sultan didn't have a son I was laughed at and told that he would then not be Sultan.All the villagers have been very welcoming and I've even been to two local weddings so far, although I’m not convinced that I’m there for the whole process, mainly because I haven’t yet seen any food at a wedding. The first time I went to a wedding I didn’t realise I was going to one- a lady who lives on my compound took my by the hand to go for a walk with her, so I went along. This isn’tunusual- she often takes me to meet neighbours (we went to visit a man whose father had eighty five wives the other day) and she doesn’t speak much French, so I normally don’t know where we’re going till we get there. She took me over to a compound on the next street where a lot of women weresitting and a lot of furniture, doors, rice and goats (living) was piled up and announced to me I was at a wedding. Weddings are sex segregated, so I’m not sure what the men were up to at this point. We all sat and chatted until the heavily veiled bride turned up, and then there was some praying(I was made to sit in a corner because I’m not Muslim) and after that we all marched off in a procession with the furniture and goats at front to the bride’s new house yelling very loudly. We took turns to go and look at the bride, who had been taken over on a motor bike, and was sitting in thenew house, some people sat down to feed their babies, and then we went home. Of course, weddings are only the beginning of the story, and divorce is a huge problem for the women here. Divorce cases tend to be decided by the Sultan, who will almost inevitably decide in favour of the man, who as far as I can tell can divorce a wife whenever he likes and then choose whether he keeps the children. When a women is divorced her family then have to pay back the dowry which was paid for here in the first place, sometimes decades before, normally in cattle. Then there are situations where women, often with many children and no support, have to go back to their families who have to pay out large sums of money. I met one woman at one of my sessions at the maternity clinic, where I go to talk about the importance of birth certificates, who had got divorced and was now living with her five children in Maga. Her ex-husband was refusing to hand over the birth certificates of the children, without which they won’t be able to finish primary school.Polygamy is fairly standard, and it apparently works out because there are considerably more women born here than men. I find this extraordinary, but a few people have said this to me and told me it is true in all of Sub-Saharan Africa (if anyone could find me some more information on this I would be very interested). It is true that when I look at the families here there do seem to be more boys than girls. The (very wonderful) national volunteer who I work with told me polygamy can be a problem because it rapidly increases the spread of HIV and AIDS in polygamous households (the incidence here is officially about 10%, but I’m not sure whether this is an accurate statistic). My neighbour Prince Mustafa (one of the Sultan’s sons) is more worried because he is thirty and has not yet married his first wife.