Berkley Center

Last week my friend’s car flipped over while tumbling down a hill. She, her mother, father, and the four-year-old twins were going to get ice cream when the car stalled, triggering a slip backwards and the fall. 

As she hung from her seat, held in by the seatbelt, people immediately surrounded the car. Car accidents are more frequent in Yaoundé, so perhaps the crowd just knows what to do. There were no “bystanders.” Instead, there were the people pulling each family member from the car; the others heading back to the car to search for bags, phones, and lost shoes; and yet more who carried the passengers to the side of the road and told them to lie very still. Thankfully, everyone in the car was fine, just some bruises here and there (and nothing was stolen). A taxi man drove half the group to the hospital while a stranger took the others in his car. A cluster of people stood guard by the wreckage to make sure everything stayed okay.

I’ve seen an ambulance in the city, but it’s clear even to me that the best strategy is not to wait for one. Police are also not necessarily reliable. But who stepped in? In Cameroon the answer to this question is always clear: the community.

Here, “the community” is not a phrase thrown around by affable politicians giving stump speeches or earnest preachers during Sunday sermons. Instead, it’s a near-tangible net that orients and sustains the individual. When you talk to someone, the other person is "my sister" or "my brother," "my aunty" or "my uncle"—even "my momma" or "my dad." A child’s last name is not often the last name of his father or mother. Instead, another family name is chosen—perhaps his uncle’s name or a cousin’s. Yet if a Cameroonian hears your last name, she automatically knows where you are from in Cameroon. Family is important, but it’s a much larger, broader family than the Western nuclear family. At first, it was a bit confusing to learn how each person in a family was related when everyone under 35 is called daughter or son and everyone over 35 is mom or dad—but that’s sort of the point. Your family is not this hierarchical entity, with mom, dad, you, and little brother set forever. It’s been explained to me that people go out of their way to specifically not describe the relationship between themselves and another person. So instead of saying, "He’s my cousin," a Cameroonian would just say, "He’s my brother." To set someone apart like that can be considered rude. If hard times come (a very real possibility), and you can’t care for your child, who will step in? It’s certainly not the state. Either your family or a kindly neighbor will keep your son from starving, so it’s better not to say too loudly “my son"—it's better to call every boy son.

During the daytime here, I don’t worry about the so-called “bystander effect,” where everyone decides that someone else will definitely help, meaning they don’t have to. Here, crowds immediately form around traffic accidents or arguments. At first, I didn’t get it. I thought people were just bored or nosy, just bystanders watching some entertainment. But people here get the importance of being a witness. If a policeman pulls over a car, everyone in the immediate vicinity cranes around to watch the interaction (I think it might be to make sure the policeman stays in line). But the crowd here is not made of bystanders; it is the mediating influence, the rescuer in cases of accidents, the restraining arms in cases of arguments, the “accountability” for policemen.

I saw another case of that a couple of days ago, when my neighborhood was abuzz with the news that a bandit had been caught that morning stealing in the Madagascar quarter of the city (a market, not an island). Apparently he was beaten to death, although some reports are that people were trying to burn him alive. I might call it mob rule, because it was the crowd that caught him and killed him. Here it’s called “Popular Justice.” Shocking? Perhaps. Later that day, I asked a taximan what he thought about it. He said that if a man is starving, he should ask his family (his community) and the community would share. “That’s what we do here,” he declared, "but a bandit doesn’t respect the community." (It should be noted here that bandits don’t just steal, they are also agresseurs in French, meaning they attack, rape, and even kill). The taximan honestly asked me, “Then what happens over there?" (referring to America). When I mentioned that the police deal with it, he shook his head. If the community can’t rely on the police, they protect themselves.

Those are pretty different images: of the crowd helping injured kids from a car and of the crowd beating a man to death; but in a way, it’s all because of the same central value that is part of life here in Yaoundé: the community.