Cameroon loses one of its best

In the spring of 2008, I ended up in Cameroon somewhat accidentally, having just left the country to its north, Chad. I wasn’t expecting the trip to be very eventful; the capital Yaoundé has some very nice restaurants and the forest is among the most beautiful in the region. But what I got instead, I’ll never forget: A taxi strike that turned into mass riots — buses burning, gunshots flying — across the commercial city of Douala. What they were protesting was nothing new; in fact that was the problem. President Paul Biya has been in his post since 1982. And he wanted to stay still longer.

Paul Biya’s tyranny is subtle, which makes it all the more pernicious. To the casual outsider (like myself), there is nothing particularly frightening about Cameroon. It works well enough; there are no shortages in the markets or soldiers on the streets. Days before the strike, it would have been easy for me to see not even a hint the anything was wrong.

But if there is nothing scary on the streets, what there is is dirty money behind closed doors. Biya has spent his three decades in power co-opting the opposition, buying off opponents, and rendering the country incapable of fighting back against his will. Timber exports, many of which are assumed to be illegal, keep the state coffers plenty full. The pain of this country is a grinding, daily, and invisible. Which is why it hurts so much that one of the few people fighting back, journalist Pius N’jawe,  died this week in Virginia. 

I tracked down one of N’jawe’s few other colleagues in the opposition back in 2008. I showed up at his house because I couldn’t think of another way to reach him, and my taxi driver happened to know where he lived. I walked in and asked for Garga Haman Adji, who recounted to me the surveillance and intimidation he endured. He had watched the opposition fracture over the years into no less than 200 parties. (Make no mistake: African politicians learned well from their colonial leaders how to divide and rule.) 

N’jawe ran Le Messager newspaper in the country, and for his defiance of Biya’s rule, he was arrested no less than 126 times. "This is some of the worst news that our country has recieved in the last two decades of our fight to free Cameroon," wrote Hillaire Kamga [my translation], another opposition leader I spoke with while in Cameroon. "You have not fought for nothing!"

It doesn’t surprise me that his co-workers at Le Messager as well as in the opposition are asking whether N’jawe’s death was an accident. Because nothing else about the way Cameroon is represseed ever is.