Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium presented by the Anthropology Graduate Student Association

The history of Cameroon is a tale of globalization that starts long before it became the nation-state today called “Africa in Miniature” due to both its cultural and ecological diversity. Even the name “Cameroon” reflects its mixed heritage, coming as it does from Portuguese explorers who were impressed by the abundance of shrimp in what is now the Wouri River and so called the region “Camerões” on their maps (Mbaku 2005). Long before any Europeans arrived with flags, however, what would one day be the Republic of Cameroon was a crossroads for migration and trade. Even the Carthaginians stopped by around 450 BCE and witnessed a volcanic eruption of Mt. Cameroon (Konde 2005).

The original inhabitants of the forests of southern Cameroon are said to be the Baka, a tribal group of very small stature who are today an ethnic minority living on the border with the Central African Republic, having been pushed there by the waves of migration of other tribal groups. The Baka people are treated worse than second-class citizens today as many of them do not have access to the government identity cards which are required of all citizens of Cameroon and must be presented (repeatedly due to the large number of checkpoints) each time a person travels within the country. Due to their small size, the Baka are also usually referred to derogatorily as “pygmies” rather than by their tribal name. Apart from the Baka’s reduced territory, two other aspects of Cameroon speak of its diversity. The first is the sheer number of different tribal and linguistic groups recognized today: over 200 in a country approximately the size of the state of California. The second is the religious divide between the northern and southern halves of the nation.

The Extreme-North, North, and Adamoua provinces of Cameroon are heavily Muslim (to the point that a visitor can’t buy food during the daylight hours of Ramadan because all the shops are closed) and include tribal groups like the Fulani and the Hausa with origins to the north and west. The southern provinces are now heavily Christian, with regional variations in denomination reflecting the dispersion patterns of European missionaries while tribal and individual variations in beliefs reflect the continued importance of pre-colonial religions and traditions. For example, many of my neighbors and colleagues in Batouri identified themselves as Christian (usually 7^th Day Adventist or Catholic in my part of the East) and expressed disbelief and reproach whenever I admitted that I did not go to church. At the same time, they also strongly believed in sorcellerie, warning me about curses and witches— though as they pointed out, I didn’t need to worry much because white people are partially immune to African juju. Sometimes it sounded like this was due to the inherent magic of white people— not a far-fetched belief considering a history of colonialism has turned fair skin into a signifier for wealth, power, and beauty— but sometimes it sounded more like we are just thick-skinned and too dumb to notice when someone is trying to ensorcel us.

The colonial history of Cameroon only increases the country’s global influences. After the Portuguese explored the coast and the Wouri river basin in 1472, Europeans began to seek out trade opportunities in slaves, palm oil, and ivory as well as establishing plantations (Konde 2005). By the late 1800s, coastal Cameroon had hosted Portuguese, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Englishmen, Jamaican missionaries, and Germans, but the local rulers still remained autonomous (Mbaku 2005). Then, in the 1880s, word began to spread among the local leaders that the Germans were trying to make treaties and that a French warship had been spotted; several Duala rulers decided they would rather sign with the British and sent numerous letters and petitions to both Queen Victoria and various British dignitaries (Mbaku 2005). The British government took so long to decide on the matter, however, that by the time they approved the annexation, Germany had already made several treaties, raised a flag, and fired off salutes in recognition of its having made Cameroon a German protectorate. After negotiations, though, the English and German governments agreed to a split and settled on the river as a boundary line. Germany later had to negotiate boundaries twice with France, too, as the French had annexed part of the interior of the region the Germans called Kamerun (Mbaku 2005).

All of these boundaries then changed with the two world wars, of course. In 1914, Germany quickly lost Douala to the Allied Expeditionary Forces, and then after the end of WWI, it lost all of its African territories (Mbaku 2005). Cameroon was split between the French and the British, becoming first a League of Nations Mandate and then a UN Trust Territory until 1957, when nationalists succeeded in pressuring for the election of a Cameroonian legislative assembly. Then, in 1960, the French-administered Cameroonian territory achieved its independence and elected its first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, and in 1961 the British-administered Cameroonian territory voted to gain its independence by unifying with the Republic, thus creating the only bilingual African country whose two official languages are both European and beginning a history of Francophone-dominated government and Anglophone marginalization (Mbaku 2005). That same year, American President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps as part of his new foreign policy plans to combat communism (Amin 1992). Only a few months later, Cameroonian President Ahidjo requested Peace Corps teachers to help raise education standards in his fledgling country— talking up the threat of “pro-Communist terrorist groups, the Maquisards” (Amin 1992:65) in Cameroon in order to help convince the American government to add Cameroon to its list of African countries receiving aid.

Only a year later, in September of 1962, the first group of Peace Corps volunteers arrived in Cameroon (Amin 1992) and unlike many other African countries in which Peace Corps has maintained a presence, since that day Peace Corps has never had to withdraw or evacuate. This is perhaps why Peace Corps was a bit slow to react to the civil unrest in 2008, and did not consolidate volunteers at the start of the violence. Thus, when Peace Corps did finally decide to consolidate us just in case we needed to evacuate, those of us outside the problem areas were able to easily reach our consolidation points (me especially, since it was my town) while the volunteers most likely to need evacuation were spread out and isolated in the relative safety of their individual homes. Luckily, we did not need to evacuate, and I know for a fact that Peace Corps Cameroon has used the 2008 events to reevaluate its emergency procedures. But what did happen in 2008 that I have labeled civil unrest?
III. Civil Unrest and the Corps

My first experience with civil unrest, apart from a few boring war protests in college, was January 3, 2008. I was not in Cameroon, I was in Kenya, traveling back from a Christmas vacation in Egypt with a couple of fellow Peace Corps volunteers. Due to a 12-hour layover in the Nairobi Airport, I had the surreal experience of eating lunch in the airport coffee shop while watching CNN International broadcast footage of events happening only a few miles from my current location. In the CNN footage, Nairobi police were using water cannon to break up the Orange Democratic Movement rally on behalf of Raila Odinga, the presidential candidate who was challenging the legitimacy of President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election (IRIN 2011a). The airport, outside the city and likely cordoned off, was seemingly untouched by the political, ethnic, and class violence which would continue right up to the start of the unrest in Cameroon. In fact, if it wasn’t for the staff stopping to watch and the convergence of other travelers around the flat screen television, I could have been in any airport in the world.

Two months later, it was with this memory in mind— of Kenyan staff and international travelers grouped around a television tuned to CNN— that I decided I had better send emails to reassure my family and friends in the States that despite the similar footage they must be seeing, of Cameroonian protestors burning down gas stations and being fired upon by the Cameroonian military, I was out of danger. The email I sent to my parents started:

subject: don’t worry

Hey, hope I didn't freak you guys out too much with my e-mail. [email by author March 1, 2008]

To which my dad responded with these opening lines:

subject: Re: don’t worry

Dear Laura,

Wow! … If you really want to freak your parents out, use Subject: "Don't Worry" and then start out with "Hope I didn't freak you guys out too much". […] I haven't heard about anything going on there. [email to author March 1, 2008]

Various other relatives and friends responded to my mass emailing with similar notes of concern and accounts of the lack of news. As my granddad put it, “You are right we have not heard about the problems in Cameroon” (email to author, March 1, 2008).

Of, course even those of us in Cameroon had trouble finding out what exactly was happening. The electricity was out almost everywhere (possibly at the government’s behest since SONEL is a national company), the Cameroonian government was censoring the local media, and Peace Corps only updated us via cryptic and/or slightly patronizing text messages similar in tone to Great Britain’s now famous WWII posters: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. So we volunteers in the East Province, consolidated as we were in my town of Batouri— just in case things got bad enough to evacuate— did what Peace Corps volunteers everywhere quickly learn to do in times of need: turn to the local expats (be it for air conditioning or a fully stocked kitchen in which to cook Thanksgiving dinner). Our local expatriate happened to be an American in the tobacco leaf export business (and a former Peace Corps volunteer) who, as we knew from experience, had his own personal generator as well as satellite television and a stocked wet bar.

It was with Ben’s internet that we all emailed our families, and with his satellite television that we failed to find international coverage of the events occurring in the west. While CNN International had aired long minutes of raw footage from the Nairobi protests and spent weeks covering the accusations of voter fraud and ethnic targeting spreading across Kenya in January and February, the only mention we found of Cameroon was in the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. And it was only one sentence, in between completely unrelated updates about other areas of the world. Yet what scrolled across the bottom of the screen during an unrelated news broadcast could have been the seed of a Pulitzer-prize winning story: protestors in Cameroon have taken school children hostage to use as human shields in the face of police action. One of our fellow Peace Corps volunteers actually witnessed this from her house, since she lived across the street from one of the targeted boarding schools in Bamenda. She had texted us about it earlier in the day, freaked out and wishing that Peace Corps would send someone to get her out of town.

It was text messages like these, from volunteers stuck alone in their houses waiting out the unrest in Cameroon’s larger cities, which gave us most of our information. While many of our Cameroonian colleagues and friends knew that it was the strikes that had started the events, they, too were without electricity at home and without access to uncensored media reports— like us, all they had were text messages and phone calls from family and friends in the affected areas. For most people I knew, the main concern was not the motivations behind the civil unrest, but the safety of those living in Douala, Yaoundé, Bafoussam, and Bamenda. Due to the unrest, the markets in those cities were closed (the main market in Douala was burned to the ground early on), water was off, and the military were deployed in the city streets with orders straight from President Biya to shoot on sight. My landlady, after receiving a text from her daughter in Douala, urged me to stock up on canned goods in case we in the East, too, wound up stuck in our houses— or, as she thought the more likely, in case the main road from the west remained closed and supplies in the East ran out.

So just what did happen in Cameroon’s big cities? That is still up for debate. The Cameroonian government and human rights activists have given very different reports while few international journalists were on the ground to document the events as they unfolded. A point I will return to in a moment. Without professional sources, that leaves the accounts of witnesses, some of whom spoke to journalists or human rights organizations, some of whom have written blogs or posted videos on-line, and some of whom have stories accessible only in person. And there is the general consensus of the way in which the events unfolded. It is the casualties, the parties involved, and their motivations that are more controversial.

The agreed-upon timeline begins on New Year’s Eve, when Cameroonian President Paul Biya gave his usual New Year’s speech. Biya, already having served as president for 25 years and in his last term according to the Cameroonian Constitution, hinted at what members of the opposition party had already warned of, namely an amendment of the constitution to allow for a third term (BBC 2008a). This change would not be Biya’s first, as he amended the constitution in 1996 to lengthen the presidential term from five years to seven (BBC 2008a). Reactions to this news, at least in my town of Batouri, varied from anger and frustration to apathy. Many told me they had expected this, and several of my colleagues pointed out that thanks to President Biya, Cameroon has never suffered from the civil wars seen in other Central African nations. Nationally, people’s reactions revealed a similar range of emotions though government censorship kept the media from critiquing the President too openly. For example, within days of airing a debate critical of the President’s proposed amendment, the private television station Equinoxe was ordered closed by the Communications Minister (Reporters Without Borders 2008). The stated reason was failure to pay a licensing fee— a fee usually only enforced when the government wants to censure the few private media stations in Cameroon (Reporters Without Borders 2008).

Three days after this closure of the Equinox TV station, the union of taxi drivers began a planned strike in Douala to protest rising fuel prices. That same day, February 25, 2008, what has been described as rioting broke out in several areas of Douala, Cameroon’s financial capital, and government security forces were deployed (IRIN 2008b). Possibly in response, possibly before the strike— reports vary but gunfire was heard starting very early in the morning (IRIN 2008b). The taxi strike is usually named as the source of the civil unrest that followed, both in reports and in my personal experiences with Peace Corps, my Cameroonian colleagues, and my students. Usually, the narrative lists it as a strike that lead to other strikes. First, the taxi drivers protested fuel prices. Then, general citizens joined to protest the rising costs of living. At the same time, these various protestors were joined by others wanting to protest other political issues: the proposed constitutional amendment, the arrests of certain opposition political leaders in the lead up to the amendment, and, in the case of Anglophones from the Northwest and Southwest provinces, the Cameroonian government’s continued discrimination against the former British colonial territories.

At some point, groups of people— often young men, according to witnesses— began looting stores and burning petrol stations, markets, and government offices, as well as constructing roadblocks using burning tires. Again, reports vary as to whether these were protestors, people simply taking advantage of the situation, or the more likely, a mix of both. The head of the taxi drivers’ union quickly declared an end to their strike on the evening of February 26 (INIR 2008c), but over the course of the next week political protests and the looting/burning spread to other large cities in the country, first to the nation’s capital, Yaoundé, and then to Bamenda and Bafoussam in the Anglophone provinces. On February 27, President Biya made a speech from France, accusing his political opponents of an attempted coup d’état and referring to them as apprentice sorcerers in the shadows trying to manipulate the nation’s youths (BBC 2008b).

To end the unrest, President Biya deployed police, security forces, and the Cameroonian military. The problem cities were put under curfew and the military were given permission to shoot anyone on the streets, a tactic many reported that they were already using from the start (INIR 2008b) as well as the usual tear gas and water cannons (BBC 2008b). On February 28, another private Cameroonian media broadcaster, the radio station Magic FM, was forced to close by armed soldiers who confiscated the employees’ cellular telephones along with broadcasting equipment like microphones and computers (Committee to Protect Journalists 2008). That same day, the Communications Minister advised national journalists to avoid increasing tensions through irresponsible reporting (Committee to Protect Journalists 2008). Examples of such frowned-upon reporting were estimates at the death toll and images of bodies in morgues with gunshots to the head. While the Cameroonian government originally placed the estimated deaths at 15, it eventually raised that to approximately 40 in the face of human rights organizations reporting over 100 deaths (Musa 2010).

Ending the civil unrest took only a few days once the military was given carte blanche, though it took everyone, whether Peace Corps volunteer, expat, or Cameroonian national, another week or so to trust that this calm would last. Glad I could write a truly reassuring email this time, I told my friends and family:

subject: all is calm

Everything has stayed calm the last two weeks. There haven't been any more protests and it sounds like electricity and water are back on in Yaounde and Douala-- and stores are opening again so people can get food. So it looks like everything is quickly returning to normal. The Peace Corps office is open again and we volunteers are allowed to travel now. Just a little excitement to hold us over until COS conference! Though I wouldn't be surprised if things heat up very fast during the next election in 2011-- a lot of people were unhappy with how he [Biya] handled the situation (not only with his orders for soldiers to shoot anyone on the streets, but also with the use of troops to regain control of radio stations that were broadcasting opposition messages). That will be long after my PC service finishes, though, so I'll have to depend on the international news coverage. [email by author March 15, 2008]

The Cameroonian presidential election this October again led to the re-election of President Paul Biya amidst widespread accusations of electoral fraud. Yet there were no internationally reported protests, nor riots, nor civil unrest of any kind when the results were announced. However, in the lead-up to the race there was one incident that made international the news: armed gunmen wearing fatigues and carrying a banner calling for Biya to step down are reported to have fired shots into the air from Wouri bridge in Douala (RFI 2011), the same place where Cameroonian security forces are reported to have opened fire on protestors in 2008. Since then, Cameroon has remained calm. Or so its absence from the news would seem to signify.

I still remember the surprise I felt when I searched for news of the civil unrest in Cameroon via Google in February 2008 and found only one article— one that focused solely on the experiences of a European missionary couple staying in their house and waiting out the events unfolding outside their compound in Bafoussam. I had traveled outside the United States previously and noted differences in news coverage. I had also known intellectually that the reported international news was always a very small representative sample of any day’s events. But only in that absence of coverage, of editorials, of outrage, of anything at all relating to what I was living through, to what was so important to my colleagues and friends, did it really sink in. While Descartes so famously wrote, “cogito ergo sum”, at that moment it felt like my existence isn’t reported, therefore it isn’t. Free of the surveillance of Foucault’s panopticon, anything could happen and no one would know. There is a very good reason countries like China and Iran have at times restricted media access and, more recently, their citizens’ access to social media like Facebook.

I ask again, what did happen in Cameroon in the spring of 2008? In the end, everything and nothing. By March 2, due to the strong military presence and sweeping arrests, the civil unrest in Cameroon was largely contained. With soldiers continuing to patrol the streets of the larger cities, most shops, schools, and businesses began to reopen (Connors 2008), and within a matter of weeks, I could email my kith & kin in the States with the subject heading “all is calm”. On April 10, 2008, President Biya succeeded in changing the constitution. Again. The Cameroonian National Assembly voted to remove term limits entirely and also voted to provide presidents with immunity from prosecution for their actions while in office after they leave it. Just this past year, in October of 2011, Biya was re-elected as President with 77.9% of the votes. His closest opponent, long-term opposition leader John Fru Ndi of the Social Democratic Front, received 10%.

Cameroon has been since before its inception as a nation-state, since before its multiple colonizations, a site of convergence. It is “only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” (Appadurai 1996:31), but I differ from Appadurai here in that while he emphasizes disjunctures and nostalgia for a past that never actually existed, I place the emphasis on landscapes and imagined worlds that converge. The Portuguese coastal region of the camarões and German Kamerun are not separate and distinct from each other nor from the French and British colonial territories with boundaries that had to be redrawn after each world war. No more than the traditions of juju and sorcellerie are distinct from Cameroonian national politics (Geschiere 1997). These scapes, in part ethnoscape, in part ideoscape— not to mention the roles played by mediascapes in this paper— are not deterritorialized but transterritorialized.

Like the Algeria of Silverstein’s research, Cameroon has long struggled with its own relationship to post-colonial France. While many countries give Cameroon aid, the French government continues to hold certain purse strings and to advise many of its former territory’s policies. President Biya, gone so often that he is called “the absent tenant” of the presidential mansion, spends a good deal of his time living in France, as do many of his fellow politicians and other wealthy Cameroonians. Those who can afford it send their children to French universities, while the school system in Cameroon is still operated along French colonial principles. While I was living in Cameroon, whenever I expressed frustration over the shops never having change for large bills, my colleagues would shrug and tell me that “C’est la France, elle a tous les pièces de monnaie”— France has all the change. What a double entendre in English, and what an expression of transnationalism.

Like Silverstein’s transnational politics of Algeria and France, Ong, too conceptualizes global relations through ambiguity and flux, arguing for the need “to examine the shifting lines of mutation that the neoliberal exception generates” (2006:12). Using Latour, she states, “network relationships proliferate hybrid values and subjects” (Ong 2006:88) and “create hybrid zones of government and citizenship” (Ong 2006:88). While Ong refers to economic zones of exception, her words also illustrate the importance of overlap in global flows. Cameroon is not just a convergence of economic influences, indebted to the IMF, still getting its allowance from France, yet accepting money from China to build new schools while Italian construction crews pave its roads and Portuguese logging companies cut down its hardwood trees. It is also a convergence of nations and of religions, of tribes and of languages. Cameroon is even a convergence of idealistic American college graduates and the microbes that cause typhoid and malaria.

So why did the media ignore these convergences, these transcapes, and fail to report in obsessive detail every nuance of the civil unrest in Cameroon? Was it too soon after Kenya’s own civilian expressions of electoral discontent? Or too early for the world stage to be excited about such “springs”? If a protest is a riot is a demonstration, and if such civil unrest always comes down to young males squaring off against police in riot gear with tear gas canisters, then what difference does it make which oil-producing country is having such violent expressions of democratic fervor? If it didn’t make a difference, this would support Appadurai’s (1996) deterritorialization. But clearly, in the case of Cameroon, it did. The simple truth is likely that no one cared. While Cameroon is not a zone of media exception, invisible to the panopticon of the mainstream international community, it is a zone of unimportance. It is not a country of rich oil reserves, nor does it have weapons of mass destruction, or a long history of clashing civilizations. It is simply one more country in the Dark Continent, one more place that Peace Corps volunteers go to and come back self-righteous and tan. Clearly, transcape or not, a nation-state can still be made invisible with the simple sorcellerie of international disinterest.

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Chapter 13

Anthropology

With the advent of modern mobility, it has become far easier for humans to visit remote parts of the world and see unique creatures. Tourism in protected areas has surged because of these capabilities, and, in an effort to capitalize on this, many popular wildlife tourist sites claim to be eco-friendly. This idea of "eco-tourism" stems from the belief that tourism can both be a boon to local populations and help conserve the environment. However, these goals are not always achieved. Many tourism operations feature primates, whose conservation status is often used as an indicator of the overall health of resident ecosystems. As such, it is important to understand the factors, both natural and anthropogenic, that contribute to primate well-being and fitness in the wild. One understudied anthropogenic influence is the proliferation of these eco-tourism operations, many of which are home to a variety of endangered primates. Some primate tourism operations have been linked to behavioral problems and reduced fitness. Unavoidable and chronic exposure of primates to unfamiliar humans can be a source of stress, as indicated by specific physiological (glucocorticoid/cortisol) and behavioral responses (behavioral stress indicators). Such detrimental and stressful impacts of tourism are likely to outweigh positive influences, demonstrating the need for a better understanding of primate responses to tourism.
“Being Human” is a complex concept that brings to mind the existential idea of humanity itself. It refers to how we interact with each other, ourselves, the world around us, and the other animals contained therein. We share the same taxonomic definition with one animal group in particular: non-human primates. These animals are often used as a guide to understanding human behavior. So why can non-human primates tell us so much about ourselves? First, they represent the boundary between humans and animals, and we can trace our evolutionary history through them. We also share many similar traits such as social connections, play, language, maternal care, complex cognition, and tool use. It is for these reasons that primates are fascinating to observe. Most people will only see primates in a zoo setting, but few, and this number is steadily increasing, will have the opportunity to see them in their wild habitats. These opportunities are made possible by ecotourism and many tourists believe that the money they spend on eco-friendly vacations is funding conservation efforts. However, tourism itself can be considered an anthropogenic stressor and may contribute to a decrease in overall primate fitness (Eagles & O'Hara 2004).