Yaoundé walkin' blues

I seem to provoke a lot of hostility when I walk the streets here in Yaounde. I had an appointment to give someone some technical training today, and walked the mile home. Along the way, people made rude remarks I was intended to overhear, started talking loudly and aggressively all of a sudden when I walked by, looked at me and laughed and made mocking remarks to their friends for my to overhear, and stared, stared, stared without smiling. It's usually young guys who actually say things, sometimes a woman, and it's only a brief something every minute or two, but everyone stares without smiling, and the streets are full of people. I've tried saying hello to people in the past, but after being mocked for this, I just walk in silence now. It's much more pronounced on a busy street like I was on today than it is right around home, where maybe a hundred other ex-pats live.

I don't want this ignorance and hostility to bother me. It's not personal. I feel petty to care about it. The people who actually say things are a tiny minority of everyone on the street. And I'm not interested in isolating myself and hiding at home. So I continue to expose myself to it in small doses, like my walk home today, to try to learn how to let it just roll through me without getting angry. I've come a long way in staying calm, although I'm still far from not noticing or caring. But frankly, even though it's probably valuable, the experience always makes me look forward to leaving. I've learned to avoid really strong exposures to all this negativity, like trips to the market, or prolonged time downtown. And every time we travel this disappears; nobody acts this way anywhere we've ever been outside of Yaounde, although I heard from an ex-pat friend that Bamenda, which is another large city, is similar.

It persistently reminds me of being a junior high student, this sense of constant scrutiny and random hostility, and the occasional impulse to cower as if avoiding a blow. I adopt some of the same coping mechanisms as I did then, and stare at the ground in front of me while walking sometimes, or wear a low cap and sunglasses to avoid eye contact. Oddly, I even find myself with that junior high requisite, a large backpack, most of the time when I'm in public, since we carry them to and from work every day. And junior high was the last time people seemed to feel free to mess with me like this. Back home, if you treat adult men like this, they can get violent.

But it's all just talk. There has never been any threat of violence in it. People just don't like how I look; a lot of the comments have "blanc" in them, which means white person. I heard from another ex-pat that people of Asian descent get a lot more negative attention yet, walking around.

"Yew've come to a haahd paaht of the wuld," a frustrated middle-aged Australian traveler assured me several months ago, when we met him on the Cameroonian leg of his drive across Africa. Sometimes it feels that way. And yet, this only happens on long walks out in public, which are pretty rare for us. We cab to work, and we don't get much of this on the side roads around home or the office where we do most of our walking. It was a shock at first, but it's manageable now, perhaps even a useful exercise. And of course, nobody we have any kind of relationship with is like this.

Sometimes I wonder how much of it is just me. I often suspect that if I were to stay here for two straight years, almost everything would seem normal. But this, I think, might take me a little longer.

We leave in ten weeks.