Part ... a story to tell a bit 'of Africa.
Jean-Pierre is probably the only member of his family that he studied - he did a few years of elementary and intermediate - speaks French and a bit 'of English. Eleven years went by foot from Rhumsiki the neighboring country to attend school, three hours of walking leg, leaving at four-thirty every morning, just as many to return. He left school because the school was too expensive: 12,500 CFA per year for registration is a bit 'less than twenty euro.
Rhumsiki is the largest village in the area and receives enough tourists. For this he developed a more in other villages. And then there are electricity, running water - at least in the hotels - and telephone coverage. Jean-Pierre has worked three years in one of the small hotels of the country without any consciousness or irony, called him 'Petit Paris'. He was right, was a bit 'of everything he says he became the manager and that the hotel was booming. Then, a neighbor has 'bought' his job; gave money to the landlord and has taken the place of Jean-Pierre, who was fired from one day to another. Now - she says with satisfaction - the 'Petit Paris' is very bad, most tourists do not go there, his master's wife asked him to return, but he - of course! - I would not.
I asked Jean-Pierre if he wants to continue doing the driving. He replied that there is a job which earn a living, perhaps, when you are old, but now he needs something else. He says that all the jobs here in the north of Cameroon, you can buy. If you do not have the money you can not even begin to work: you do not nothing else to do who cultivate the land to feed themselves. That 's what Jean-Pierre does not want to resign themselves to do. His idea, to avoid the fate that will not accept, is to join the army. He needs to try to get 50,000 CFA in the 'BIR' - a kind of special body for rapid intervention: the Marines of Cameroon, as I understand.
has already tried once more: the amount paid and he did a year of hard training. Forty kilometers of travel with a lot of fifty pounds on his shoulders. Or twenty-five kilometer race with twenty-five pounds over his shoulder. is a race-elimination: If you arrive between the last is excluded from the course and go home. He told me boys died of a heart attack during the tests. Jean-Pierre finished the training, but was not taken the same, in the end, among the survivors, there is a draw: his name is not released. It says without anger or sense of injustice is something that happened. He decided to try again, save for putting together the 50,000 cfa he needs, then make another year of training. He says it's the last attempt, if it will fail again, you resign to become a farmer, like the rest of his family. "To cultivate millet and peanuts to eat, so all his life, until you die."
I tried to ask if there are other, less crazy. Why not try to go into town - Maroua is three hours by bus - to find a job? Replied that there are no industries, merchants and craftsmen using only their own children, or provide slave wages, to obtain a public place of any kind, you have to pay absurd figures. The 'place' in the Marines is the cheapest of all. This lack of industry, not only in Cameroon, but in West Africa in Morocco, for what I have seen, is evident. There are no factories. Apart from some refinery and few power plant, there are almost no industrial buildings. I remember a factory of beer, a feed, a sawmill, but little else. There are stores everywhere, but for a whole number of disparate goods, which fill the ubiquitous weekly markets and the huge markets of fixed capital: clothes and shoes, tools and electrical equipment, plastic buckets and tin pans, cell phones and lighters , knick-knacks of all kinds. They are, above all things of poor quality and low price, all right: but you are selling, have a market.
The problem, in fact, is not the absence of a market for industrial production. The Africans are poor, but also consume them. The problem is that everything is sold and consumed here is manufactured elsewhere. He is still in the markets, a lot of crap produced in France or in Europe more generally, even something that comes from Italy - I have found sconosciutissime Italian brands of pasta, olive oil, hazelnut and of vermouth (!), do not ask me what's inside. But the big, of course, comes from China. The warehouses of the Chinese wholesale dealers in all the squares of African cities. The goods arrive with large discharging cargo at ports on the Gulf of Guinea and is carried by truck across the continent, the market's poorest most remote villages, you will still slippers, tubs, plastic, batteries and T-shirts (Bootleg of all major European football teams) made in China. Including transport by sea, the cost of the product is so low that prevent the creation of a local industry.
is the usual story of neo-colonialism: it should not surprise me, though, up close, it hurts. It goes a bit 'of sandpaper on the face of my strong beliefs in favor of the market. With the lie of 'free trade' and their policies, imposed by the World Bank and WTO, Africa will never develop its industry and is condemned to remain a market, poor but not insignificant, for the low-end goods industrial countries on duty. They are only changed the beneficiaries. For centuries the British have invaded their empire of dirt, destroying - especially India - the local industries and then started to do the same in other European colonial powers, came after the United States and Japan. Now it's up to the Chinese. Everyone, without exception, historical or geographical, protectionists in favor of its industry (not to mention agriculture, because there's no shame) and "free trade" to slaughter the poor countries' markets.
Meanwhile, without the jobs that the industry would, Africans who leave the countryside in search of a life less indecent can only pile up on the outskirts of the city to do anything. In fact, you see them in the tens of thousands as in Dakar to Bamako, Accra as in Yaoundé. To do nothing, or rather intermittently engaged in processing trade of improbable or 'services' insane: everybody tries to sell any product or service to all others, asphyxiated in an economy that does not include the production and development will not know. Meanwhile, the few major projects, infrastructure development projects - the little 'money for' aid 'that will not go into pure and simple corruption, or to preserve Western officials scurrying about everywhere (but what do they do?) on their shiny Toyota - them realize the big foreign companies. Western or, more importantly, the ubiquitous Chinese. With their technicians. The Chinese also lead workers. Even from here, I work for the Africans did not come. It is not only a tragedy for the lack of income is a tragedy for the lack of opportunities for discipline, fatigue and joint pain. These people can not develop any class consciousness, no collective dignity, no work ethic. It is the Protestant ethic that has allowed the development of the spirit of capitalism is amoral ferocity of the spirit of capitalism that has created the Protestant ethic. Here, the heat, it is easier to remember. TO BE CONTINUED ....
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