Nostalgic Past meets Bleak Present…

The lines of fate course across his creased forehead, evoking decades of trial and triumph. Graying brows shadow his tired, rheumy eyes which peer at me from a safe nostalgic distance, a distance in his past. My questions drive those eyes further into the emotional recesses of a past to which he willingly returns. Then the words start rolling from his quivering lips. Slowly he narrates experiences steeped in the proverbial wisdom of his time. He savors every word, as though they are invisible anchors holding him to everything he still believes. For, not even the lines of time running across his forehead have dampened his belief.

“You know my son, it is not until the river runs dry that you know the value of its slow journey,” he begins tentatively. Then more assuredly, he lunged into the life of privilege that they once inherited through their colonial encounter with the British. “In the days of British Southern Cameroons…” was the preface to every story. And the tales ranged from the hydroelectric plant at Ombe which never faltered, to the printing press and stores in Limbe which augured a boisterous economic future. Then he talked about the Prime Minister’s lodge nestled in the fog-covered slopes of the great Mount Fako. The mountain, which he still fondly called (like Hano the explorer), “the Chariot of the Gods.”

To listen to him speak would be to think that the colonizers had done no wrong. However, he only lives in a world of comparison where our union with La Republique du Cameroun has bred marginalization and disenfranchisement. As we try to chart a future, the past is distant and the future ought to be the product to constructive creativity.