Martin Jumbam

Cameroon is like a mask dancing

By Martin Jumbam

(Revised and reproduced from Cameroon Post, No. 88, November 6-13, 1991, p. 11)

The early nineties were knotty times for Cameroon. As the country slowly untangled itself from the suffocating grips of over thirty years of a well-oiled repressive machinery put in place by the country’s first president Ahmadou Ahidjo, and used with such devastating efficacy by his hand-picked, French-approved successor, Paul Biya, violence spilled over onto the streets of just about every city and town in this country. The “wind of change” then blowing throughout Africa seemed to have caught Biya and his cohorts completely off-guard as they tried in vain to block it from touching this triangular oddity called Cameroon.

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Sex in the land of Perestroika

By Martin Jumbam

(Revised and reproduced from Cameroon Life, Vol.1., No. 6, Nov/Dec. 1990, pp. 36-37)

Before I give you the “meat” of this write-up proper, I’ll take a detour which some of you, eager as I know you always are to read about sex, will find a little irritating. But, please, gentle reader, kindly bear with me and buckle up your seat-belt of patience for a while, for you are about to zoom into something deliciously juicy, just the type of stuff I know you love to hear. Okay? Good, here we go.

A drink by the banks of the Wouri

There’s a beer house overlooking the turbid, heavily polluted waters of the Wouri River in the Akwa District of Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital. To my friend, Andy “Young” and me, it is the best drinking spot anywhere in the city.
What with its little booth-like cubicles called “buckaroos”, and its still-to-be-rivalled bevy of heavy-bosomed , hip swinging ladies, some in see-through dresses, who dance along rather than walk.