Nomads: The Memoir of a Southern Cameroonian

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93 7 t was sometime in 1968 that West Cameroonians learned with certainty that the new police force, unlike the old, was trained to be the enemy instead of the friend of the citizenry. It must have been 4:00am, very early in the morning one day with families still soundly asleep when we heard heavy insane banging on our main door. My father was at the door in no time only to find that the hoodlums were in fact uniformed police officers. They were asking for all kinds of nonsense—identification papers, receipts for electronic gadgets, even those as old as, if not older than some of the officers were and so on. My father identified himself as a police officer before stepping out into the morning hours to look for and protest to the officer in charge. This must have been my very first encounter with the French language besides the gibberish a few friends already in French speaking schools used to babble on the playground. My childhood neighbor, a certain Henry, was attending a French speaking school and he used to sing some strange songs to us that made it even harder for us to tell what French words could be like. On this dreadful morning when order died in West Cameroon, all the officers were shouting at us in French even as my father spoke back in English, only for them to demonstrate that he was not making sense to them. His identity card was all that made some sense to them, especially as the uniform he had on was that of the original West Cameroon Police Force. Frustrated by the lack of communication between him and his colleagues supposedly, I 94 my father stormed off after instructing us to stay within and not open the door for anyone. Having waited for my father to return to the bedroom in vain, my mother came out to the sitting room where we were. I told her what had transpired, and that my father was outside. Just then, another round of banging started. It was as if they were going to smash in the door if nobody answered. When my mother opened the door, she was only trying to locate my father in the darkness outside, and so did not even listen to the police man shouting angrily in French at her; not that she would have understood him either. As my mother moved to the side to avoid any contact with the intruding officer as she tried stepping out onto the veranda, he struck her with a stick in her thigh. It must have stung my mother as she immediately turned clawing and shouting at the police officer who had struck an unarmed woman. I launched at the man below the waist level, given my height, punching and like an offended puppy, baring my teeth in readiness to bite, when our neighbour, Mr. Tanyi and his wife, tore mother and son off the cursing police man just as other police men rushed to the scene of the fracas. A lot of shouting ensued between the Tanyis and the uniformed men, each shouting in his own language. I remember Mr. Tanyi asking angrily if they were trained to go about beating up women and people’s wives. He called them a thieving police force for going around at night instead of by day if indeed their job was for the good of the people. About an hour had gone by before my father returned to see my mother’s swollen thigh. Fuming with anger and his nostrils flaring as he breathed, my father was determined to find the police man responsible for assaulting my mother, the police man who had struck his wife. This 95 time out I accompanied him as he walked out again to look for the officer in charge to whom he had protested earlier on before returning home. Even as a child, I could recognize the commanding officer. It was Mr. Chiabi, the fair-skinned police superintendent whom we, as kids, described as “pussy-eye” because his pupils were not exactly black but were like those of a cat instead. They must have put Mr. Chiabi in charge hoping he would be able to discipline the bunch of ragtag men under his command. Chiabi was Anglophone and possibly Ikeja if not Scotland Yard trained, but he was expected to control a bunch...