Why We Insist on Making Things Harder Than They Need to Be
The writer observes a recurring scene at a local secondhand shop where cars are dangerously offloaded using makeshift wooden ramps, when a proper metallic ramp would solve the problem. This sparks a reflection on a deeper Cameroonian tendency to valorize difficulty and resistance to practical innovation, even when easier solutions are available.
Every Saturday morning I like to eat BBH. I usually buy from the Bamileke Mami around the corner from my house. When I buy from her during the week, I usually go to her shed as early as 7 am, and then hurry back home to eat as I flip through news channels before I set off for work.
But on Saturdays I like to sit down with the good folks eating there; most of them bike riders and handymen, listening to their stories as I eat my beans, puff puff and pap. Last Saturday as I was sauntering to visit my ‘contri woman’ I stopped to watch some funny event.
There’s this shop specialising in the sale of second hand items from Europe; a “brocante” as my brothers from this side of the Moungo call it. A truck carrying a container had parked in front of it and some guys were trying to offload a car from the container.
There were about 12 people around the truck, all of them trying to hold stable some unhealthy-looking planks that were being used together as a ramp for the car to roll off of, from the container to the pavement. At some point, one side of the car almost slipped off the planks when one of them splintered.
“Hhooope hhooope!” Three or four people shouted in unison, asking the guy driving it out ot hit the brakes. Some other piece of wood was brought from heaven-alone-knows-where and wedged in between the other pieces. Finally the car was able to roll off and that was not without first hitting the pavement dangerously and knocking off the front bumper. That’s when it dawned on me. I had seen that happen many times at that ‘brocante’. That was likely the fifth time this year that I had seen a car being offloaded from a container in that same manner.
I began to ask myself why the owner of the brocante had never sought to buy a metallic ramp which would make offloading a car a hundred times faster and a hundred times safer.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that, we Cameroonians are champions at not wanting to give ourselves the tools to make our lives easier even when we have the tools readily available to do so. It’s like a prostate cancer. Enshrined in our DNA and passed down the line from father to son.
We usually have this funny notion that “harder is better.” It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who told me he doesn’t understand why the majority of Cameroonians choose a manual car over an automatic. Someone who was with us said it’s because manual cars “make you feel the clutch better.” He added that people with automatic cars cannot drive because they do not know the sweat it takes to do half clutch.
How can you say that? (Insert Issa Tchirolie’s voice here) I wonder if the person stopped to consider that perhaps automatic transmission was invented so people would concentrate less on the effort and the hassle of doing the half-clutch thing and just have more focus and attention on driving.
It is the same notion that lives in people who prefer to line up in front of SONEL every month when they could easily use Mobile Money to pay their bills.
It’s also why they force us to cram mathematical formulae for our GCEs when in the U.S. formulae are given during exams and the focus is put on using these formulae for real life applications.
I wrote the SAT with all the formulae to the questions at the top of the question paper and as much as I can remember, that did not make it any less tough! Or maybe I just suck at maths.
Nevertheless, all this points to a systemic problem which goes right to the top of the “leadership” position in this country. I put leadership in quotes because those who are in leadership positions today are nothing but ghouls.
I’m pretty sure you can name some other examples as well. I don’t know if it’s because we can’t think to do and afford better for ourselves or maybe it’s because we think that harder is sweeter.
But luckily for us, we are a new generation. A more conscious one at that. We are more open to the world and more in sync with the pace at which it is moving and we owe it ourselves to be able to move along with innovations that radically change our lives and make the different processes around it a lot more fluid and a wee lot easier.
- Wandji Wilfred.
Written in late 2017, this piece captures a moment of generational reflection in Cameroon—a time when young, educated, globally-connected citizens were increasingly aware of technological and systemic alternatives to established (often inefficient) local practices. The writer situates himself as part of a conscious generation observing older patterns with both empathy and critical distance.
The piece moves beyond surface complaint to name a structural preference for hardship over efficiency that the writer traces from individual choice (manual vs. automatic cars, in-person bill payment) through institutional practice (exam pedagogy) to governance itself. It remains relevant because the tension between cultural habit and practical modernization remains unresolved; the optimism about generational change invites readers to reconsider whether awareness alone shifts entrenched patterns.