My new role as a Cameroonian agony aunt
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 18/Oct/2010 09:37, 34 days ago
In last June’s BPC exam for Cameroonian lycée students (the rough equivalent of the GCSE in the UK) one of the essay questions set for the French exam was “Is it better to have a wife who is educated? Give your reasons for and against.”My friend Akilo, the twenty year old baker and roadside café owner with afascination with dinosaurs, pizza, and Leonardo di Caprio, has been having problems with his love life. He’s been engaged since before I knew him to a girl in Maroua, and the plan was that she would drop out of school at the end of last year and they would get married in June or July.The marriage was arranged between Akilo’s father’s family (his parents are dead) and the girl’s father, but Akilo often went to see her in Maroua. They got on well and he even told her stories about his strange white friend in Maga.When I got back to Maga after the summer in England the first time I saw Akilo he told me that the marriage was off. I thought this might be some kind of late teen rebellion (he was also talking about buying a motorbike) and I didn’t find out the real story until a couple of weeks later when we were drinking coffee together at his café. A girl came in and gave Akilo a present of dried fish, and although she didn’t speak any French we exchanged greetings in Fulfulde.“She wants to be my new fiancée,” Akilo explained gloomily. “She comes to see me every day. She sells fish.”“Do you want to marry her?” I asked. He didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the idea.“Definitely not,” he said emphatically.“Why not?”“She’s a Mousgoum. Everyone knows all Mousgoum women are crazy in the head.” (It is true that the Mousgoum, the dominant tribe in Maga, have a justified reputation for being a bit mad, bad and dangerous to know).  “How about a nice Fulani girl?” I suggest.“Well, I still like my old fiancée,” he told me, “but now my father’s family have forbidden me to marry her.”It turned out that Akilo’s fiancée had announced her intention to stay at school and try and get a job as a healthcare professional. In June she’d gone over the border to Chad to take her baccalaureate exams (exams are much easier in Chad than Cameroon and fake qualification certificates can even be purchased there for a reasonable price). Akilo has no secondary school qualifications and his father’s family decided that a wife with too much education wouldn’t respect him. They also that if she went out to work every day instead of staying in the house it was certain she’d meet another man sooner or later and run off with him.Respecting his family’s wishes Akilo broke off their engagement, but then started worrying that his fiancée might fail her exams on purpose so that she could marry him. He rang her up in Chad to tell her that she should work for her exams and he’d think about things.Now he can’t decide what to do: he doesn’t want to disobey his family and he thinks they might be right that an educated wife would give him trouble, but he really likes the girl and can also see the advantages of her education.He asked me what I thought he should do. I didn’t find this an easy question to answer: I suspect his family do have a point that marrying a girl with a much higher level of schooling might cause problems. In the end I listed all my reasons why educated girls make better wives (I’ve had enough practice!) and told him if he does want to marry her he should let her finish school.