This is Not Their Normal Life—Not at All

Pencil Vs. Camera 3 by Ben Heine

By Peder Frederik Jensen

Translated from Danish by K.E. Semmel

The refugee camp Guiwa is located in a clearing out in the bush, and stretches across the hilly landscape of eastern Cameroon. It’s late afternoon. People are getting ready for the evening. They collect water at the well, while a flock of teenagers stand chatting at the pump. The youngest children play. A man approaches the car. He’s well dressed. He bids us welcome, and Hamdiata Dialo asks how he is doing. Does he need anything?

The man throws up his arms. Of course. A home would be nice, or peace in the Central African Republic (CAR), his homeland. Like most everyone in this camp he’s from Bangui—CAR’s capital—and is therefore not used to living in the countryside.

What do they need? Educational and employment opportunities for one’s children? A functioning democracy, health, a world without all the destructive corruption?

Probably so, but the man just gestures with his arms, smiling.

“We need blankets,” he says.

The nights are cold, and they are forced to sleep on bare ground.

They also lack the necessary paperwork that determines whether they have to migrate further or can remain here in this camp on a minimum of food and other necessities delivered by the UN’s refugee organization (UNHCR). They also grow a few crops here, though as city dwellers they’re not qualified to cultivate. People refer to Canada as the Promised Land.

Photo: Peter Frederik Jensen

*

Hamdiata nods and listens. He is my guide and interpreter. We’ve come from Garoua-Boulaï, the northern border crossing to the Central African Republic. On the way we’ve visited some of the more than 300 groups living in the region. People who, through the years, have fled from their unstable homeland.

Since March 2013, when CAR’s Michel Djotodias seized power in a violent coup—the latest in a long chain of rebellions that have plagued the country and left their mark since its independence from France in 1960—the number of refugees has increased. On January 10, Djotodias stepped down as president, opening up a fresh wave of violence.

When Jean-Bédel Bokassa, one of post-colonial Africa’s most infamous dictators, stormed to power in 1965, with President de Gaulle’s and France’s blessing, he became the first in a series of leaders with no interest in democracy. Bokassa was busy buying homes and mansions in Europe, building palaces, murdering and repressing his people and pilfering the state—and he was occupied with his sexual escapades, and cannibalism. Evidence suggests that he consumed his enemies and that, over a period of years, he managed to serve human flesh to the European dignitaries who visited his country. A case in point: When he was finally removed from power, the partly dismembered remains of a murdered mathematics teacher were discovered in a freezer in his private home.

Parliamentarianism has been introduced on multiple occasions, yet each time there is a successful election, it takes only a few years before a new rebellion removes the democratically-elected leader and inserts a new despot.

All this serves as a kind of backdrop to my visit. The people who live out in the bush are not casualties of history. They are not an appendage to the catastrophe “down there in Africa.” They are human beings who desire a life worth living, who dream of reaching the big cities and getting an education. They are people who live under unfortunate conditions. Few dream of going home to CAR. The country is done, they say and shake their heads.

*

It has taken some time to slip through to UNHCR. A misunderstanding somewhere in the organization has delayed my entrance into its sanctified halls. When I arrived at its regional headquarters in Bertoua, I couldn’t get farther than the guard. I sat on a plastic chair in the shade, and waited while my papers and a letter from the Foreign Ministry were inside, being deliberated with the authority in charge, who claimed she could not receive me. She insisted that I provide a letter from the capital explaining my interest and the reason for my visit. In other words: The woman to whom I had twice written in advance of my trip wouldn’t deign to give me so much as one minute of her valuable time.

She needed clearance from the capital.

But I had all my paperwork in order. I had written to UNHCR in Cameroon and the Scandinavian office in Stockholm several weeks in advance, I had telephone conversations, and I had held a meeting with the organization’s communication’s delegate in Yaundé, the capital of Cameroon; but she had never properly assumed responsibility for my stay, and hadn’t involved the upper management, and without their blessing you don’t get any farther than the guard. Without the director’s knowledge, you are nothing more than a strange and incomprehensible blanche (white man), who comes calling with his demands.

*

Three days passed in bureaucratic silence, until I finally had to pull some strings. The former Danish consul for 40 years, Hans Winther Nielsen, helped me.

Less than one hour passed from the time of my telephone call to monsieur Nielsen until a meeting could be arranged. The organization’s countrywide director called me, apologetically trying to explain. I nodded but kept my thoughts to myself.

I took a scooter taxi to UNHCR’s building. The regional chief Mr. Kourouma, a slightly distracted man, offered to send me a car the following morning. He showed me a map of the area; small stickers marked the villages and camps. On each sticker was a number. In total, more than 100,000 people live in Cameroon with the status “refugee.”

Many live where no one can reach them, far out in the bush. It complicates our work, he explains.

Sweating and distant, it seemed as if he longed to lie down—as if he were sick. Earlier in the week, armed militia members took him captive. The kidnappers turned out to be former rebels from CAR, hiding among the civilian refugees in Cameroon. After several days of negotiations for better conditions in the camps were Mr. Kourouma and another abducted released.

*

The next morning we drove to Garoua-Boulaï, up to the border and then back.

Near a collection of huts we turned suddenly off the road.

The huts were round and made of straw. The road was impassable, and we parked beside a well that served as a kind of hub for the small community. Hamdiata pointed at the well, just as he’d earlier pointed at a school in Garoua-Boulaï, and just as he would later point at a cement foundation, and he said: “Sanitation.” We walked down a path leading into the bush. The houses were scattered over a large area. The narrow paths connected the huts with each other and with the well. A short distance away were two huts with a field in front. A woman harvested crops with a machete. Hamdiata greeted her, and she returned his greeting; they exchanged a few polite words. The woman’s face was deformed, her eyes set too deeply in her head, and the proportions were wrong, as if her head were too small for her body. She looked at me and swung her machete, while Hamdiata continued walking toward the huts. Then she smiled and nodded.

At the hut an old woman approached us. Both women were dressed in traditional attire: swathed in colorful dresses. The material began at the ankles and ended on the crown of their heads. The old woman’s face was furred like a plowed field and her voice was sharp. They began to converse, and via Hamdiata, who interpreted from Fuoldou to French, I discovered that she had fled from her region when Anti-Balaka forces (“anti-machete,” a Christian militia that, among other things, consists of supporters of the former president François Bozizé) had attacked the village and killed the men. Her husband had been among the dead. She and the deformed woman in the field had taken the children and a few of the possessions they could bear, and they’d crossed the border. As she spoke, I noticed small faces peeking out of the hut, but they would retreat, shyly, whenever I glanced in their direction.

By the time we reached the well a short time later, our car had become encircled by children. When they saw me, they fled screaming down the road only to sneak back again, until a hand gesture or a step in their direction sent the group once again scuttling in motion.

The small roadside community was typical of the Muslim groups of refugees. They settle immediately and have no desire to go back. They are farmers and shepherds who are used to agriculture. They cultivated the earth where they come from, and they cultivate it also here.

The line that separates the two countries doesn’t affect them. They live a primitive existence and survive as they have done since the Stone Age. They raise cattle and roast their food over a fire. The modern wells and schools are positive additions. Certainly the wells, at least.

Whether the children go to school, or whether they are kept home to work, Hamdiata can’t quite say. But at one point, when we stop at a school that UNHCR has built, the rector approaches our car.

The stout woman looks incredible, like a character from Pirates of the Caribbean, an explosion of Creole fireworks.

“I’m angry,” she says and begins to catalogue a number of problems. The school is for refugees and locals, but the refugees keep their children home. Although the reason is probably economic, it seems that there are many small issues, controversies and clashes that lie in wait, and when the woman—who has a curly goatee and wears a nougat-colored turban with a light-purple wig underneath—once again disappears into her house, and we begin to drive, I can’t get a clear answer on just where the problems originate, and where they end.

*

One important piece of the puzzle is the postcolonial failure. The drastic transition from being subjected by a foreign power to becoming a responsible, independent nation. What follows is the conflict between tradition and modernity, corruption and hunger. A mindboggling difference between rich and poor as a consequence of Bokassa’s regime.

He was the dictator who, in 1977, crowned himself emperor—an event that cost 22 million dollars. At that point The Central African Republic lay in ruins. Bokassa had been president for a number of years, and he’d drained the state’s coffers: the school system was in tatters, the child mortality rate was high, and corruption permeated society. The only functioning institutions were the military and the president’s flotilla of vehicles. Bokassa, a former sergeant in the French army who had never really gone to school, installed his 17 wives throughout the capital city. He visited them many times each day, and his convoy would put the entire city on standby. The women came from all over the world. A Swede was among them, a Vietnamese, a Rumanian and a number of women from African countries. In total, they gave birth to his 55 children.

France supported Bokassa’s crowning. They needed him and the country’s resources. Many high-level authorities in the French administration had, through the years, enjoyed the despot’s extravagance. The dictator had instituted hunting clubs, and he lavished gifts with a generous hand. It was in this way that president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (France’s president from 1974-81) was given a game reserve for his own disposal, where it is said that he shot more than 50 elephants and an untold number of other animals. Bokassa was even more generous with diamonds, which found their way to the right European pockets. A small gift for the wife. In all modesty. Merci…

But when the regime beat down a student uprising—with, it is said, Bokassa himself participating—the country had had enough. Scores of students and teachers lost their lives in basements. Among them was the mathematics teacher who was later found in the freezer, who was doubly unlucky, since he was also eaten.

Only two months after his extravagant crowning, France, facing the tremendous pressure of public criticism in Europe, sent troops into the country to oust the madman.

And this is how the misery has continued ever since. Every now and then, the former colonial power intervenes, officially to assist the beleaguered population, but unofficially to protect its economic and political interests in the region. Today, trucks loaded with military supplies from the Cameroon port city of Douala cross the country toward the border, toward the war. The armored tanks and the camouflaged Jeeps all bear the Tricolor.

Here, people are convinced that it’s the only justified course of action. I try to discuss the responsibility of the local residents, but most reject this by referring to the colonial past. The international community and Europe, they believe, will have to sort it out.

By coincidence I share a hotel with a man from Mali who turns out to be the new director of the region for UNHCR. He assumes his new job this month, he says, when the current director shifts to Chad.

He has a different opinion. We eat breakfast together. At one point he asks:

“How come Africa is the only continent in the world that hasn’t learned to live in peace? Fifty years have passed since decolonization, and we’re self-destructing. Why? We have everything. All the natural resources, wood, agricultural land—but we can never reach accord.”

Neither of us has an answer. He’s of the opinion that Africa ought to take responsibility for itself. That Africans should no longer use the colonial past to explain the present, but should act independently to limit the number of conflicts and wars.

*

In the refugee camp Guiwa 31 miles from the city, people say very little. They just wait. They follow the news and stay prepared. They dress in western clothes, and some are well educated. The eldest man in the camp looks like a university professor; he extends his hand in front of his house, which is made of tarpaulins.

“Nothing new. The situation hasn’t changed,” he says. Apart from the increasing number of dead. We all know that.

A young man approaches me and asks me to come with him. He would like to show me his home, his wife and his children. He pushes the tarp to the side, and I look into their 32-square foot residence.

They sleep on blankets that lie directly on the ground. There’s nothing else in the room. There’s a little nook to one side—the kitchen. His wife and children sit inside. The children play. The family hopes for better times. I ask about their health, and would like to know more about their work, their lives and family, but Hamdiata has grown impatient. He wants to go home now, before it gets dark. I say farewell to them.

“Will you return?” the man asks.

“I would like to,” I say. I hope so. I wave and walk to the car. At the car I get a view of the activity beside the well. They are city dwellers. They don’t like me taking pictures.

This isn’t their life. Not at all.

Peder Frederik Jensen (b. 1978) is a Danish writer born in Copenhagen. He has attended Forfatterskolen, the Danish School of Writers, and made his debut in 2007 with the novel ‘Her stÃ¥r du (You’re Standing Here)’ (Samleren). He is a trained boat-builder and has collaborated with other young authors for the Danish magazine for the homeless, ‘Hus forbi’. In 2009 he founded the literary magazine Morgenrøde.dk with three other authors. Peder Frederik Jensen received Albert Dams Mindelegat in 2012 for his work.

K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, World Literature Today, ‘Best European Fiction 2011’, and elsewhere. His translations include Karin Fossum’s ‘The Caller’, Jussi Adler Olsen’s ‘The Absent One’, Erik Valeur’s ‘The Seventh Child’ and, forthcoming in 2015, Naja Marie Aidt’s ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’.

This article was previously published as ‘Det her er ikke deres normale liv, slet ikke’ in the Danish newspaper Information on January 5, 2014. Click here to read the original text (in Danish).