Nomads: The Memoir of a Southern Cameroonian

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141 10 e waded through the travails of the State of Emergency, doing all we could to lead normal lives by adapting to the new socio-economic climate, even as the mind struggled with the recent happenings that would leave Bamenda scarred forever. It was late afternoon the very next day after my close encounter with gendarmes near Ngomgham Government Primary School, and I was sitting in my lounge wondering where the nation was headed when I heard the gunshots echoing off the slope on which my house was lodged. I pulled aside the thick drapes and peeked in the direction from where the shots came. A huge crowd of excited and irate young men had assembled in front of a neighbour’s house on the opposite hill—the well-known Alhadji Tita Fomukong. There were all kinds of stories going around about this neighbour especially that which claimed he was a gang boss. I was still trying to figure out what a crowd was doing in front of Alhadji’s house when, all of a sudden, Alhadji emerged from his house into the fenced yard in front with a revolver in his right hand, and fired several rounds into the air over the crowd as people dropped to the ground screaming. I wondered where the soldiers were to rescue this man and his family and property if indeed Alhadji was a member of the ruling Cameroon’s People Democratic Movement party as it was claimed. Nobody showed up. About thirty minutes had gone by when the overworked police helicopter surfaced from nowhere, it seemed, flew a few circles over the area and W 142 apparently half-heartedly tossed several tear gas canisters far away from the angry mob into a nearby valley, to no effect, and then it turned and was gone as quickly as it had showed up. “We di finish with you today, Alhadji,” shouted a young man just as another tossed a flaming tyre onto Alhadji’s roof. The tyre would burn for a while, and then the flame would die out. The crowd was undeterred. Several futile efforts were made before another young man shouted out a warning. “Wuna di waste time. If wuna never cut da mungang for yi waist, da house no fit burn.” Just then, Alhadji made the costly error of stepping out of his house again, possibly to empty a few more rounds above the crowd in the hope of dispelling it when a few daring young men standing close by jumped him. Alhadji ultimately succeeded in running back into his house after struggling with the young men for a while. One claimed to have cut off the charm strapped around Alhadji’s waist. Renewed efforts at burning his house down suddenly paid off. A flaming tyre sailed into the building through an open window, just as another lodged itself on the roof of the main building. Before long, I heard the crowd shouting in jubilation. I rushed out onto my veranda and saw Alhadji’s house belching out thick layers of black smoke, even as bright red and blue flames rivalled each other sporadically rising higher and out of the thick smoke. Through a side window, I could tell the fire was growing stronger and stronger by the minute, in spite of the darkness that settled on the valley neighbourhood of Ngomgham. One could hear a woman’s cries fading in the distance along with the receding daylight. One was later to learn it was Alhadji’s wife who was being carried away half- 143 naked in a wheelbarrow by an angry mob. It was said she had been foul-mouthing Chairman Fru Ndi and the Social Democratic Front Party for sending “vandals” to attack them; the same Fru Ndi who had been held under house arrest by the government. This had offended the crowd more than anything she could have done at that moment. Nobody knew how terribly wrong things had gone for the Fomukong family until about late morning the next day. Another angry group of young men had stormed Alhadji Fomukong’s home early in the morning as if to ascertain the house got burned down indeed. From there they marched angrily down the valley and through a path that emerged right in front of my house. For once, I wondered if my landlord, then with Cameroon’s diplomatic service in Washington was a C...