GEF's Outlook

What African Women think inside - A review of poetry on Batuo’s World

Blog reviewed by George Esunge Fominyen

Is it easy to be an African woman? Always having other people deciding what you do, have, like or say; and how you should feel and act. Except if you are a woman like Joyce Ashutantang; a Cameroonian literary academic, actress, playwright, scriptwriter and poet.

In a series of poems posted on her blog –Batuo’s World – she masterfully brings out women's  innermost feelings about love and life that some of society’s “protectors” in her country and continent of origin would want gagged and buried inside.

One of those issues is whether to allow women choose to keep or terminate pregnancy within given conditions. In “Sarah Palin: A Poem for Women” Ashutantang writes: “She can kill a moose, I can’t / She touts a gun, I hate guns / She derides abortions; I stand by them; my body is mine…”

Recently in Cameroon, persons who speak for women (and who seem to know better than women about choices they should make) got thousands of men and women to march on the streets against the parliament’s decision to ratify the Protocol to theAfrican Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa which simply provides that right to choose.

The Sawa Chiefs, Christianity and African Traditional Religions

In the first week of August 2009, the traditional rulers of Cameroon's Sawa ethnic and linguistic group organised a march through the streets of Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, angered by a government decision allocating a piece of land - located at Besseke in the city's Plateau Joss area - as State property,local media reported. The Sawa want to build the headquarters of the Ngondo, their 300 year-old cult, on this site.

What caught my attention in this protest was the form it took. There was the march, a petition to the President of the Republic and (more interestingly) a church service at the Native Baptsist Church, which was followed by a ritual which included the burial of a goat (or sheep) on the site. It was the stark depiction of the African caught between living his/her old ways and being the reverent Christian in a modern world.

Is such open reliance on both the God of the missionaries and that of their ancestors a sign of Africans ready to openly live their multiple beliefs?  

Witchcraft and Justice 2: The Case of Cameroon

By George Esunge Fominyen

In December 2008, the  American newspaper Star Tribune reported that a woman of Cameroon origin  had filed a lawsuit in a US Federal Court accusing another woman for using voodoo to steal her man and ruin her life. By February the woman had withdrawn the case citing the power of prayer as the final sword in her battle to regain "her man". This affair drew a mix of contempt, ridicule and sympathy for her, as it seemed  absurd that one would dare to file such a case in a court of law.

 If this woman had been well advised she would have simply taken the case to the land of her forefathers. Article 251 of the Cameroon penal code  provides that anyone found guilty of practising sorcery could be punished with imprisonment for up to 10 years and fined 100,000 FCFA ($200). All she needed to do would have been to prove her allegations. Well, that's where things become awkward. How do you prove the existence of what is essentially supernatural? 

The News Media and the Pope in Cameroon

By George Esunge Fominyen

The Pope has left and Cameroon is not so hot in the news anymore. That is the way news organisations work. Still, it was fun to read distant papers like the Seattle Times mentioning Cameroon. And I'm still to get over some of the interesting, absurd (would you say bizzare?) stories that popped-up in relation to this Papal visit. From the controversy on condoms and the spread of HIV, through echoes of Cameroon's First Lady's head gear at the welcome ceremony to maize named after the Pontiff.  Here's how the media covered Pope Benedict XVI in Cameroon...