Cameroon

Harry is in Douala for one day, and it is the day the election result lands. He and Kieran are mugged and Kieran is arrested; the whole of Harry’s Cameroon material is that day and the morning after.

The verdict both of them give afterwards is the same, and it is the reason this page is not a warning: Cameroonians were extremely friendly, the country was friendly, and what happened was their own doing.

Observations

From Attacked and Arrested in Cameroon’s Deadly Protests 🇨🇲

• The politics. Paul Biya had been in power 43 years and was 92 years old; during the day Harry is filming, he is returned for another seven-year term. The grievances people name are corruption, unemployment and the absence of opportunity.
• What an African protest is, in Harry’s framing: not tear gas and water cannon but live ammunition. Six people had already been killed when he started filming.
• The anger is regional. People from the north are the angriest. Since the bike-taxi riders are largely northerners, they were banned from working that day in case they caused trouble.
• People are paid to come and cause trouble, he is told on the street.
• It’s a French-speaking country and Harry speaks none; the day runs on whoever speaks English.
• Businesses shut completely for election day. He describes the city as a ghost town.
• The police are corrupt, in Kieran’s account after eleven hours in custody: they wanted money, and some were good and some were not.
• Espionage is a live charge for a foreigner with a camera. Kieran was accused of it and told it carried ten years in prison or a $17,000 fine.
• Hospitality that has nothing to do with any of the above. Strangers call them over to drink, buy the beers, warn them off a specific road, and treat them as family within minutes.
• Being offered a wife is a normal social move, which Harry finds genuinely interesting rather than uncomfortable — friendship and family arrangements extended to a stranger in a way he says would not happen in England. He is jokingly quoted a bride price of two million cows.
• The US visa posters are back. The same Trump-branded “register now for a free visa” posters he saw across Liberia are up here, complete with warnings about photo quality. His read both times: it’s a scam.

Places

• Douala