Struggling To Forget

There are memories we cherish and memories we wish to forget. An event could be so ecstatic that one would wish to live it on and on. Yet other events should never have happened. Here I am looking at the many events which should never have happened.

The month of March is so pregnant of events I wished never happened. On 07 March 2007, three dear friends Bate Bessong, Hilarious Ngwa Ambe and Thomas Kwasen Gwangwa disappeared in a road accident along the Douala-Yaounde deathtrap called road. Just yesterday 07 March 2015, another colleague, Barrister Yanou Michael was lowered into his grave after also disappearing on the Douala-Yaounde deathtrap.

Japanese wished there was never a 10 March 1945 when tons of atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki claiming many. Time stopped in those cities. Many Japanese have also consciously obliterated that single nihilistic event from their collective memories

There was the Jewish Holocaust under the German Reich, the NAZI Adolf Hitler. This event is barely remembered today so that never again shall man embark on that perilous route. But that collective memory and guilt was not enough to stop the Rwandan Genocide.

Even as the Rwandans remembered, in awe, how low they descended in 1994, the Archbishop of Bamenda and the Catholic establishment rehearsed on how to wipe out the Mbororo Muslim community because they were infidels and did not deserve to live.

Even as protests were taken to the doorstep of the Archbishop for one year starting from February 2013, he was unperturbed and on 03 April 2014, he descended on Mamada estates, armed with three caterpillars, hired gendarmes, bribed judiciary and the Pontus Pilate Bamenda administration and demolished all houses belonging to the ethnic Mbororo minority indigenous group.

We would like to remember Nelson Mandela but not the apartheid he fought. Rosa parks is revered and remembered but not the bus segregation and racism she rose against. Slave trade and slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism we wish never happened yet still ongoing could not be cherished as a memory.

As Mamada Estates rises from its ashes once more, I sign out with one cherished memory.

On 08 March 1992, Minister Yaou Aissatou of Social Affairs, presented a trophy to me at Hilton Hotel Yaounde in commemoration of the International Women's Day. I won a first prize in a competition to stop violence against women. The only bitter after taste of that trophy is that violence against women still continues more than 20 years after. We are all guilty of these stoppable excesses.

Mbororo of Mamada estate attack demolition machine with stones and sticks

Fon Christopher Achobang
Social Commentator, Human rights activist)
The Cameroons
Tel, (237) 699 36 59 54
(237) 674 21 10 66