The new Mischa in Maga
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 15/Feb/2011 16:10, 34 days ago
The past week in Maga has been tough by any standards: there was the humiliation of being dragged up to dance solo in front of several thousand young people from Maga as part of the celebrations for National Youth Day, there is the chronic crisis of the crates of textbooks that have been sitting in schools for three years which the teachers are too scared to use because they might be sent to prison, and there is the acute crisis of my school that has been temporarily closed after some of the local population started threatening the headmaster and the students.But for me, all the same, this week has been a good week: on Sunday February 6thone of my neighbours gave birth to a small baby girl called Mischa Dibrin in Maga hospital.With little Mischa, aged two days oldMischa is her mother’s eighth child and sixth daughter. Exactly two weeks before she was born her father, after over twenty years of marriage with his first wife, decided to take a second wife. The last months of pregnancy are a common time for second marriages, as men get fed up with not having sex with their wives.Most men I have discussed this with see it as an excellent method of protecting male virtue from the overwhelming temptation of extra-marital sex. The marriage was a drain on the family finances and Mischa’s older sister Mariam, who is one of my best friends in Maga, is currently not going to thelycée because her father doesn’t have money to pay her school fees.Mariam took me to meet her new stepmother, who is very young and beautiful and doesn’t speak a word of French. “What do you think about having a new stepmother?” I asked her.“Ask me in a couple of months,” she replied. “I haven’t got to know her yet.”Baby Mischa is affectionately called“Mischa princesse de l’Angleterre” by her family, a jokey reference to the fact that I am a ‘Princesse de Maga’ by virtue of being the Sultan’s ‘daughter’. She will grow up just down the road from where I live now in a mud house with no running water and a couple of electric bulbs but no plug sockets. She will sleep on the floor with her five sisters, and from the age of about four she’ll be expected to help with the household tasks; cooking, sweeping, going to market, fetching water, washing dishes, and chopping wood.But things for baby Mischa look good. She was born at the hospital and already has a birth certificate, unlike the vast majority of children in Maga.  She’ll go to primary school and probably to secondary school like her oldest sisters, even though very few girls in Maga ever make it that far in their education. Her five big sisters are all funny, bright and articulate, and despite the fact she is an eighth child her first week has been spent surrounded by her mother, grandmother, sisters, and an endless stream of aunts.This morning, as is traditional for Muslim babies on the tenth day after birth, she was officially named by the local Marabout, who was a bit bemused by her unusual name.“Wife of Dibrin,” he asked her mother, “What sort of name is Mischa?”“She’s named after the white girl who lives with the Sultan,” her mother explained.“Hmmm,” said the Marabout. “That is a good solid name.”