Walking the "Ghost Town" in North West and South West Regions

Bamenda, December 9, 2017. Thomas L. Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem tells the story of how violence turned Lebanon into a shell-shocked stalemate and green-lined Beirut into “a huge abyss, the darkest corner of human behavior, and an urban jungle where not even the law of the jungle applied.”

The Anglophone populations of the North West and South West Regions of Cameroon have defeated the notion that strikes mean violence.

The empty schools, markets, streets and even movements in villages that captured the picturesque in these two regions could be likened to the description of the old day Lebanon and Beirut. A ghost visited all main the localities in the North West and South West Regions to the point that even mad men and women deserted the streets and village squares.

The type of life that can only be compared to a toad in a heating tube that keeps adapting to the changing temperature as the melody of a ghost town that keep changing to adapting temperatures. A scenario that the Ministers of Basic and Secondary Education angrily left Bamenda after attempts to transform administrators and traditional rulers into classroom teachers flopped woefully. Their prayers for parents and teachers to send students and pupils was responded in what has been described as "Ghost Town".

In Bamenda for example, life was such that no want could predict what he or she is going to see in a ghost city while walking the streets. Yet the inhabitants seem to enjoy themselves in the quarters in a mode that can hardly describe the deadlock that looms high. Along the Bamenda Commercial Avenue and Molyko street in Buea, one could accidentally see a slinking shadow disappearing into the side of a brick wall. They are kids who have transformed their yards into football fields. Only the most courageous were able to open their eyes to what the Ghost town had to offer. The bumpy and dusty nature of the roads made of sand would eventually tell you that the people are angry. Even strangers felt a connection to the people’s past.. But, now as ghosts, as the past bleeds into the present and vis-a-versa, even areas like Mobile Nkwen in Bamenda caught cold. By 10 pm, only two bars were open, few bikes and apparently no cars. The noisiest spots in town were completely dead silent except the few soldiers at road junctions. Every footstep from behind seems to be those of a ghost which remains everyone that you are in a ghost city.

It is a completely an unlike experience than the experience you get in East Cameroon. Here, it is The Consortium that is the symbol of a Wirbanalized symphony that everyone listens to, respects and abide to its decisions. 

 

When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)