I wrote, a few weeks ago, about the joy of discovering the television of a foreign place. Back then I was in Rotterdam, watching a Dutch variation of the popular UK Saturday night dating show, Take Me Out. I was grateful to see if not a familiar face, then a familiar format: something that made sense to me when the language did not.
On a work trip to northwest Cameroon a week ago, I had the reverse: a common language (half the time their official languages are French and English) but largely unknown setups. That is how I came to be watching a pastor on a stage in what looked like a megachurch, delivering a family of witches from the eternal damnation that surely awaited them if they continued down their dangerous and destructive path. The screen was grainy and the sound was poor, but the subtitles and the overly animated gestures of everyone onscreen involved kept me going.
It was no Take Me Out I grant you, but it was entertainment and human drama on a similar level, even if the stakes were very different.
The language when we landed in Yaounde, in central Cameroon, was firmly French: the road signs, the calls of the currency exchange guys outside the terminal, the hotel receptionists. As we moved further into the northwest, the signs began to change – by the time we’d reached Makénéné, the grip of French has loosened and given way completely by the time we ended up in Bamenda. I mentioned the northwest of the country specifically, as it is a firmly Anglophone area: under German colonial rule until their defeat in WWI led the League of Nations to hand it over to the British, who were governing Nigeria next door. In 1961, they joined the already independent République du Cameroun, which is one of the reasons why Cameroon does not have a single Independence Day (interestingly and unnecessarily confusingly, the name ‘Cameroon’ is actually of Portuguese origin). My first two days in Cameroon had been spent in Bamenda, and the hotel television gave a mixed diet: National Geographic, Al-Jazeera, BBC World (obviously) as well as French-speaking channels like TV5Monde Afrique, a Nigerian channel or two (NTA and whatever the aerial could pick up) and a curious Arabic-subtitle movie channel (which is how I came to be watching an uncanny valley Ray Winstone/Sean Bean hybrid utter the immortal “I’ve come to kill your monsta!” in Beowulf one warm night).
In Bamenda, I had managed to watch Live and Let Die, as crisply as the 70s intended, with breakfast, but then we moved further north, going up into the astonishing mountains and vastly more rural regions of Kumbo and Ndu, where television reception was a lot more mercurial. The proximity of Nigeria means a shared cultural identity as well as television one. So there were music channels with Africa-wide music, and a few Nollywood film channels too. And of course, there were the religious channels, featuring bearded men against backdrops of the Ka’aba and the evangelical Christian channels, on one of which I spotted the witches of two generations.
The drama of this particular scene cannot be overstated. There was organ music playing in the background, a constant, tinny sound on the television speakers, and the minister stalked the stage with purpose. The man of the family had his family lined up: two girls, one looked newly out of her teens and the other a few years younger; and two teen-looking boys. He spoke as though in a trance: “That one is my daughter,” he said, pointing at one of the boys. “I recruited the boy for her.” He carried on ‘revealing’ who was who in that dazed-but-sure voice, and each new disclosure brought forth a whimper and a head clasp from his wife, who kept exclaiming “I did not know! I did not know! All these witches in my house, pastor! OH, GOD.” And then when the confessions were over, the minster began casting out the witches. They left via shudders and eye rolls, leaving the bodies they had inhabited without prior permission in convulsive waves and spasms. The minister laid on hands, and compelled them – in the name of Jesus – to leave. And leave they did. The family looked around them, stunned by their deliverance; the congregation’s voice rose as one, marvelling at the awesome sight.
Even for all the time spent in Nigeria growing up, this made for a compelling spectacle. Cameroon – and Africa at large – is broadly made up of religious societies (there’s a reason the Catholic Church sees its diverse population as a ripe growth area) and of course, television reaches far more than the church on the corner can. Onscreen, a rolling tickertape gave addresses for the next gatherings of the faithful in two cities across the continent: in Nairobi, and some 2,000 miles north-west in Lagos. There was a prayer line with a Nigeria country code, and an email address to send prayer requests to. Globalisation is real, and God is a part of it.
Back in Bamenda a couple of days later, the morning I was due to drive back to Yaounde for my flight home, I turned on the telly and came face to face with 80s-era Sylvester Stallone – weird wet-look mullet, rippling muscles, shirtless, dog tags nestled in his tanned cleavage – in Rambo III . All the swearwords had been muted out, so there was no ‘shit’ or ‘bastard’ or even ‘son of a bitch’. But the scenes of torture and killing remained intact, and it wasn’t even noon yet.
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