By Hans Ngala
There is no one who has stood at Up Station and looked down at the sprawling metropolis of Bamenda and not been left in awe. Bamenda, a town with few natural resources was one of the cleanest and most infrastructurally developed cities in Cameroon.
Standing at Up Station at dusk or if driving into the city at dawn, one can see a million lights across the city. As you descend from the Up Station Hill into the city, the first sight that usually greets you is the imposing logo of the Cameroon Baptist Convention (CBC) at the Nkwen Baptist Center.
A drive to the Commercial Avenue reveals towering new buildings housing hotels, banks and other commercial services. For a town where most people don’t earn much, this was truly a demonstration of the Cameroonian Anglophone’s resilience to manage the few resources he has well.
Then fast-forward to 2016 when the war started. Many people who had settled in Bamenda and invested there, had to flee. This included a good number of Francophones from the West Region who in early 2017, had to leave the town in droves for fear of attacks.
The brand-new buildings that had been characterizing Bamenda for decades slowed down – but did not stop completely though.
It makes for apt comparison between larger cities like Douala and Yaounde where houses being put up for rent by landlords are usually the equivalent of toilets or barns in Bamenda. For example, it is a known fact that most landlords in Yaounde and Douala usually put up houses for rent without proper toilets for tenants or sometimes there are even no toilets at all to begin with!
This would be a taboo in any Cameroonian Anglophone community that there is a house for rent without a toilet, leaving tenants to simply handle their “business” however they can.
In Yaounde, there is the famous case of human feaces that flows on the streets just opposite the market at Acacias. The tenants do nothing about it and neither do the local council authorities care. It is just a “normal” Francophone thing. In Douala, it is the same thing.
No wonder, the late Cameroonian musician upon visiting the city in the 1990s remarked that “Bamenda ei ei, I no fit forget you” after the remarkable progress and development he witnessed in the residential town of Ni John Fru Ndi.
Although the war has set Bamenda back several more years, the impressive houses being built by the locals, is testament to the fact that the Anglophone man knows how to manage his resources far better than his Francophone counterpart.
In fact, some Francophones in Yaounde and Douala have sold all their lands and squandered the money to the point where if there is an occasion that requires the presence of guests, there is usually no space left to host the guests. This results in a situation where they literally have to block roads and put canopies on the roads to host their guests!
While there are some camps that would have Cameroonians believe otherwise, it is evident that there are in fact two Cameroon’s. One Cameroon is the one in which supporters of those in power would say even the blasphemous things in order to get into the good books of the leaders. That other Cameroon is one in which Francophone kids are trained to physically assault their teachers and be rude to them. In a system that is so highly corrupted and where there is no accountability.
In the midst of all this, Bamenda stood out as a town with a difference, showing what a people are capable of when they manage the little they have, well.
