YAY for Women
on The Road Less Travelled (Cameroon), 12/Mar/2010 20:52, 34 days ago
March 8 was Women’s Day and in Cameroon this is quite an event. There is a special fabric that the President’s wife chooses out and all the women who can afford it (it costs about 13 dollars) get an outfit made out of it. The fabric design is created through a competition where people submit drawings of vignettes and Mrs. Biya (The president’s wife) chooses the winners and designs the overall fabric. This year it was a fairly ugly choice and even had a spelling mistake. The colour possibilities for the fabric were a peptol-bismuth pink, a light green and a yellow. The yellow was by far the most popular.People are not allowed to wear the fabric in public before March 8 or before Mrs. Biya wears it on the 8th because you can actually be arrested. Also men are not supposed to wear the fabric on the 8th but may do so after the day.A picture of Mrs. BiyaI was in Yaounde for this year’s Women’s Day and I went to see a bit of the parade. Everyone was pretty excited to see that we (the three white girls) had gotten outfits made out of the fabric. And people were very interested in Greg because it appeared as though he had three white wives. People kept asking him if they couldhave one of us.One of the funny things at the parade was that no one had told the women ahead of time that they were not allowed to carry purses in the parade. We were luckily standing right before the parade reached the main drag and so we witnesses many people having to leave their purses with friends or husbands. There were also incidents where police were prying purses from the clutches of these women and men who were drowning in all the purses they had been given to hold.After the parade we went to have lunch at our new favourite restaurant in Yaounde which is a Vietnamese restaurant and then we went to catch the train and head back up north. The train ride and bus ride back to Maroua was pretty uneventful although it was quite hot.Me on the train