The Black Man and his Visa

1. Circumstances that led me to travel to China

1 1 1 Circumstances that led me to travel to China completed high school at the Cameroon School of Arts, Science and Technology or CCAST in Bambili in the northwest part of the country. I studied history, economics and geography. CCAST Bambili is a prestigious state school in Cameroon, and they admit the brightest students. As it is with most young men, I had many ambitions about my future. I had average grades, therefore I could have a place in any state university in Cameroon. At that time, one course of action occupied my mind: enter university, climb the academic ladder as far as possible, become a full time university lecturer. I had no money but had a kind of irresistible hope and urge that it was impossible to stop me. Never did I imagine that years would come to pass without me realizing my dream. My father was a medical practitioner, an herbalist and a spiritual healer. He owned his own clinic in my hometown of Santa. There he treated and healed the sick. He was treating not less than eighty patients a day, therefore his life was not supposed to be miserable. He had many wives and children. In that case as in most African polygamous homes, it was difficult for him to sponsor us in school. At the time, his clinic was doing well, and he very busy. We his children were still young and still at primary school. We were doing very well in school. However, just a few years to the time that my brothers, sisters and I began completing primary school and started entering secondary school, he slowly and steadily sank into a kind of depression. He started drinking and could not I 2 sit steadily in his clinic. He would sit in bars, and when the patients or the sick came, we his children had to go around and call for him, “Papa, patients have come,” and return with the reply, “Ok, he is coming.” He would go to the clinic, administer treatment, and return to the bar. His life was a daily routine like this. Most of the time he kept his drink before him without drinking, but he just had to sit there. With this kind of habit, naturally the clinic deteriorated and he could no longer raise any money from it. There was a problem too that he had a less businesslike attitude, as most of the people he treated ended up paying him just with thank you. Then around 1998 he said like a joke that his time was over, “time pass.” Slowly everyone forgot his real name. Most people knew him as “Pa Time Pass.” At this time, each of my father’s wives had to sponsor her children in school because he had nothing to offer. My mother had six of us. I have five sisters, and my uncle adopted one of my sisters. Therefore my mother, a peasant farmer, had to send my four sisters and me to school. This was not an easy task. She tried her best each time, until we graduated from high school. There was a big blockage after that. She could not afford to help us enter university. The burden was heavy on her and anybody could see this, for she always took loans at the village meetings. At times, it was too heavy on her to settle these debts. By May 7, 1991, my father passed away at the age of fiftytwo . The family missed him as a good and caring father. There was the psychological burden of living without a father. But our mothers did not experience additional burdens because for the past five years, they had been the ones sending us to school. 3 By the time I was completing high school in 1993, it was already too hard on my mother. It was clear that if I had to rely on her, I could not enter university. My sisters had to go to school too, at least up to high school, so my mother could not afford sending me to university especially as there was no university in my hometown or in my province as a whole. During this period when I had to stay at home, I worked hard in the farms hoping that somehow I could succeed in having a good harvest, selling it and entering university. However, most of the time I...