A few years ago, I was riding shotgun in my cousin’s car. He had recently had the car as a gift from his parents after his graduation from medical school and was quite eager to drive it around. Any reason was a good enough reason to drive the car and so I parked my Leggedez Benz and decided to exploit his blithe penchant for driving that car.
We were driving around one day looking for Mentholalum (I told you any reason was good enough) when someone's car hit us from behind. The guy was clearly in the wrong. He was also an ENAM student. My cousin knew him quite well because he had seen him in some social circles. He was the son of some director at some ministry. He did not know my cousin though, and also denied any wrongdoing in the accident. Eventually, things heated up and in the course of the argument, the ENAM student asked the question I was sure would pop up.
“Do you know who I am?”
We, Cameroonians, throw it around quite frequently. I am sure you must have heard it many times. I have too. Someone had asked me that once too.
That expression is a symptom of one of the deep wounds that have gangrened the Cameroonian society and has produced a physical and mental stratification of our society; some sort of caste system that has elevated some people and at the same time has buried the huge majority underground. It is pervasive in our society and it has its roots in a deep and past place.
The result of this is that, increasingly, we have people who live their lives trying to break out of their caste and establish themselves in a higher caste. Also, it shows people, who, so long as they are above any other person in society will try to trample on the other.
That is why you will see the child of a policeman falsely accuse a banana seller of having perhaps given them the wrong amount of change. And then policeman will cook up a reason to lock the trader up without any due process. We've all seen something like that.
I have been trying for a while to think really hard where this all comes from and I think I found the answer. Complex. More precisely, inferiority complex. Not superiority, inferiority. Tino Foy posted something on Facebook some months ago. He said.
“Even though in possession of a unique opportunity to lead change, Africans in the diaspora have no incentive to help Africa out of its economic deprivation because as Africa remains poor, they have a place where they can be looked upon as the elite. We (diaspora) work in the most demeaning conditions in exchange for two weeks of glorious living in December.”
He couldn’t have said it better. But I think it goes further than that. Back to the period after WWI when Cameroon came under British and French trusteeship. You see, our president was born in 1933. So by the time most African countries were gaining independence in the early 60s, he was a young man of 27. The only thing he had known till then was French rule and French rule says the policy of “assimilation.”
Young men like him in French Cameroon at that time aspired to be ‘French Citizens’ and when they went to the prestigious French universities under scholarships, they somehow missed Aime Cesaire’s essays on “Negritude” and considered themselves French citizens by extension.
And when they came back, they likely could not stomach the fact that they were the same people as those they had left behind. Their inferiority complex turned into a superiority complex. They most likely began to keep to their own circles; out of which was born the cancer of elitism today.
I believe they intentionally run this country aground economically and socially so that they can always at least feel superior by virtue of having access to certain areas that the rest of the population cannot.
How can you explain, for example, how an ordinary Cameroonian like you and me cannot take pictures in some areas around the entrance to the presidency? Security reasons? I see people taking pictures around the white house all the time. Is Cameroon under more security threats than the USA?
It is this same cancer that brings about the kiss-ass mentality that most of our ministers have today. Most of them are products of this elitist system either by birth, by design or by kissing the right asses enough, and have all now come together to deify themselves and bask in the midday revelry that they can get away with just anything. And most of them do.
Unfortunately that has dripped down to our generation and is the reason why the ENAM student above thought he could intimidate us with a ‘you know who I am?’; ENAM being by default the flagship institution where the proponents of this philosophy are churned yearly.
So the question now is, how do we deal with this cancer? I thought of giving my opinions on the subject, but I had rather I read your proposals instead. Let’s all meet in the comment section.
- Wandji Wilfred