Bandits and poisoned arrows
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 31/Mar/2010 21:23, 34 days ago
Last week I cycled for forty minutes through a Saharan dust storm for a meeting with the women at one of my village schools, and when I arrived, to my annoyance, there was no one there. About fifteen minutes later some women hurried up to where I was waiting (being stared and pointed at by a group of giggling small children) and explained that they had decided to cancel the meeting because bandits had attacked the group’s President the night before.We set off at once to visit the President and see how she was. Everyone in the villages here lives in compounds with mud walls that surround several huts for sleeping, cooking, and keeping the animals in. The bandits, the President told us, had burst into her compound at one o’clock in the morning, and had broken down the door of the hut containing the family’s five cattle and started to drive them away. When she came out of the hut where she was sleeping with eight of her eleven children the bandits beat her up and knocked her to the ground, cutting her face. The cattle, which are needed to pay the school fees of the older children, and keep the oldest boy in university, were gone.Her husband, who I also know very well because he is the President of the School Council, showed me the barbed arrows that had been shot at the house. The metal tips of the arrows were two different colours, and I was told that the arrows with the darker tips had been poisoned. I was assured that if the poison from one of these arrows entered your blood stream you would die quickly. He then proceeded to demonstrate how he knew there was poison on the arrows by licking the tips and explaining that the poisoned arrows tasted bitter. He asked me if I would like to taste them for myself. I declined.The family and their neighbours believe that the motive for the attack was racial. When the World Bank funded the rice-growing project in Maga in the 1980s they moved several villages so that they could drain a lake for irrigation. This village, which is dominated by the Touperi tribe, was moved onto land that traditionally belongs to the Mousgoum tribe. Apparently many of the Mousgoum now feel they have a right to raid the Touperi villages, because the Touperi are trespassing on their land. This Touperi family are sure that the raiders who stole the cattle were Mousgoum. One of their neighbours expressed regret that he didn’t have a gun. If he did, he told me, he would go out and kill the raiders.The President then explained to me that she was very worried because I, a white woman, had come to visit her compound, and she was unable to offer me a bottle of Top (an ubiquitous African brand of over-sugared soft drink) because there were no shops in the village that sold it. A bottle of Top costs half a day’s wages picking rice in the fields. I was incredibly embarrassed as I explained that this was completely unnecessary: the woman had been beaten, her family’s livelihood had been stolen, and she was having to worry about trying to find a fizzy drink for her white visitor.I asked if they had been to see the police about the attack: they had, but they had no confidence that anything would come of it. It was often the police, they told me, who sold the bandits their weapons.I came across another example of Cameroonian law and order at work yesterday. I was visiting the Sultan’s four wives in the women’s quarters at the back of the Palace of Pouss and there was a teenage girl there whom I’d never met before. The Sultan’s third wife explained that she was sixteen and her father had taken money for her dowry from three different men, and then spent it. The girl (rather than her father) was now under house arrest until the situation was resolved.