Risdoh & the creation of modern Cameroon ( final part )

Perhaps late General Leclerc is loved and admired by French-speaking Cameroonians, because, he showed a courage not known to be the hallmark of French soldiers. For he gathered a rag tag army from Fort Lamy now N’djamena, Chad located in French-speaking West Africa and fought his way to Europe and in the process, daring the formidable German Afrika Corp, commended by the excellent General Rommell aka desert fox. As for late General Charles De Gaulle, the other French hero, French-speaking Cameroonians don’t love him.

The only French-speaking Cameroonians, who love him, are the politicians that he gave them political power in 1960. Another reason why De Gaulle is not loved by French-speaking Cameroonians is that, he was too arrogant and more, none of them can really recall his military pedigree, as they do with those of Marshal Leclerc. At Lycee du General Leclerc in Yaoundé, where Risdoh was attending her secondary school via a scholarship that she obtained as she was graduating from primary school, she maintained the brilliance which was hers, when she began attending nursery and primary schools. At those times, at the end of every academic year, Risdoh was certain to come home with a prize for her academic distinction. She was the pride of her family and her mother was convinced that, she was on the path of Mrs Tsanga Delphine.

While Risdoh was a star, her two brothers were the shame and headaches to their family. Risdoh’s eldest brother Tabala was a well known armed robber, who began stealing when he was just 5 years old. And since then, he has spent various periods of incarceration at the Kondengui Maximum Security Prison of Yaoundé. The last reason which took Tabala to prison was his arrest by Police men, after their gang of armed robbers failed, when they wanted to bugle a residence at the highbrow Bastos neighbourhood in Yaoundé.

In the operation, the owner of the house was killed. Normally Tabala, the armed robber and also the elder brother of Risdoh, would have been killed. But since he was a national or native of Yaoundé, which means is an Ewondo; his life was spared by the irate crowd. In Cameroon, whenever a thief, even the thief of an egg, not to say an armed robber, is arrested in action by the crowd, he or they are lynched by the crowd. But the mob or jungle justice applied in Cameroon to thieves varies from one town to the other and from one region to the other. There is no standard form of punishment for thieves in Cameroon. For example, in Douala, the commercial capital and also the most populated city in Cameroon, the way an arrested thief is treated in the neighbourhoods of Deido or Makape/Bonamosadi and Ndogbong, is diametrically different from the neighbourhood of Bepanda and elsewhere in the same city of Douala.