Touring Girls

1. Free Ride

1 1 Free Ride acob Mbuy was a young man from the village of Ntamambang. He was doing his third year in the University of Yaoundé when he learnt that the then president His Excellency Amadou Ahidjo had increased the amount of bursaries for students of higher learning. The amount was now 35,000 FRS a month for third year students. He calculated that if he managed it well he could pay his rents, buy all his food, have enough for taxi to school and still have much left for social outings for him and the numerous girlfriends he was harbouring around town. Talking about girlfriends, Jacob Mbuy was really addicted to sex. He went for ‘everything in skirt’ and wouldn’t give up until he had pushed the skirt right up beyond the neck. In Yaoundé, his afternoon and evening assignment was sitting in front of his roadside hostel and laying traps for the numerous secondary school girls who were walking home from school. He put all strategy in place to catch his prey ‘Hi Baby, Can you do me a favour? I wish to get some information about someone in your school.’ ‘Sure.’ The poor girl would say taking him for his word. He would ask of inexistent persons and would end up by proposing to the student to have a meal or drink with him in his hostel and finally some taxi money to take her home. In Yaoundé, 90% of secondary schools students trek to school and the distances are often very far. Worse still, most of these teenagers don’t have anything to eat at school. They are thus very exhausted and hungry by the time they are returning from school. In this case most of them, mostly the girls are vulnerable and would easily fall prey to the likes of J 2 Jacob Mbuy. That was the kind of life Jacob led in Yaoundé during his last year in the university. Back in his home village in Ntamambang during holidays, he was a girl juggler. This village had four secondary schools: two missionary and two public with very elderly women, some of who had been married and who had avoided the town schools to study in the village in order to stay away from urban exposure and shame. As is always the case with a village girl, being invited to the town or city by a man for a date is always a welcome invitation. This was an opportunity to enjoy some modern life, eat some good food and have a good drink in some modern restaurant or hotel and maybe dance some good music in some night club of class instead of the village bars. This would also be an opportunity for her to prove to her other classmates that she was in a different social class. Jacob knew all this and exploited it to his fullest. He picked them up, used them and dumped them off like toilet tissue. Curious enough, they were the girls who celebrated the pick. Half of his bursary for a month taken home during a vacation was enough to massacre dozens of school girls. That was Jacob Mbuy by the time he completed from the University of Yaoundé. When graduates were applying to the government for teaching jobs which were the most common jobs for graduates those days, Jacob preferred to write his own application to teach in a missionary girls school in Yaoundé, the College of the sisters of Mary because it had very beautiful and fresh young girls. ‘You want to teach here’ asked the principal, a catholic reverend sister of Canadian nationality. ‘Yes’ ‘But you are a graduate; you have a bilingual degree, why don’t you apply to the government where you will earn more 3 money? What do you like in this school? My beautiful girls?’ What a trap? A good interpretation of his intentions! The calm way the woman put the question tempted Jacob to take her earnestly and say yes, but he recollected just in time to see the lady looking straight into his eyes. ‘The government has no more vacancies in the city of Yaoundé and the tendency will be to send us to the provinces and this will obstruct me from following up with my Masters degree in the university.’ A good lie from Jacob. The woman stood up and moved to the window and called...