On March 8, Cameroon celebrated International Women’s Day. Just like Fete de la Jeunesse, parades were held in every town and city nationwide. Mora was no exception, and this time I outdid myself- I marched the length of the parade ground not once but twice! First with the high school teachers and then with my colleagues from CADEPI.
My postmates and I also hosted neem lotion-making workshops throughout the week with women’s groups, offering them a potential income-generating activity, but also emphasizing the properties of neem as an anti-bacterial and insect repellant (neem can also be used for dental treatment, spermicide, and other medicinal purposes). As you can see we are all wearing the traditional Womens’ Day pagne.
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The color choices were unfortunately limited to baby blue or bright pink...
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More recently, Andrea and I hosted a girls’ empowerment camp called “Strong Voices: Communication and Dramatic Expression” funded by her college. Assisted by high school students from a local drama club, the girls practiced public speaking (eye contact and voice projection), negotiation, persuasion, verbal self-defense, and acting through skits they created themselves. Many of the skits depicted conflicts between the girls and older family members over when they should marry and whether they should finish school or have jobs.
I thought this would be a good opportunity for a post about gender roles, to give insight into the cultural hurdles impeding girls in Northern Cameroon .
Gender inequality is a nationwide problem in Cameroon , but it is much more accentuated in the North (as are all development problems here!), particularly in rural, conservative Muslim villages where most of the population is poor and uneducated.
I had a revealing chat during a bus ride with a female university student from Yaounde named Stephanie. She was visiting the Extreme North for the first time, and emphatically criticized gender roles in the North versus the South: “It’s not normal to enter into arranged marriages when you don’t even know the person you’re marrying! Women in the North are like slaves to their husbands! The men discourage the education of women here, because education opens your mind to new ideas, you get rebellious, you create your own rebellion and that creates problems for your husband, so men don’t want women educated!”
Stephanie summed up the contours of the problem. Women in the North 1. marry very young, 2. are largely confined to the household, and 3. have little access to education.
Let’s start with marriage. I offended Stephanie by assuming she was married, since she’s in her mid-20s. She exclaimed in surprise, “No! I’m still young aren’t I?” She wants to finish university and find work first, then marry a man who appreciates her motivation to work.
If Stephanie was a woman from the North, though, her response would probably have been, “Of course, I married before I finished high school, and I have 4+ kids!” The majority of girls 15 or older in the North (in some villages even younger) have suitors or are engaged or are already married, generally to much older men. For example, my friend Nadia, who is 18 and hasn’t finished high school yet, was married to a delegate in his 30s this summer. My other neighbor is 17 and was recently married as a second wife to a man in his 40s.
Your future husband courts you by sending gifts- rolls of material, jewelry, purses, scarves, etc- during Ramadan or Fete de Mouton to show he is interested. He will then visit your father to ask for your hand. If he meets family approval, that is, he has a stable, well-paying job, marriage follows soon after. Girls can seek to influence their parents, but the final decision belongs to the father. It seems in many cases if it is a good match the girl’s objections are overridden. Also, the eldest sister must be married before her younger sisters.
Parents marry their girls off very young by Western standards. A woman’s limited fertility is used to justify early marriage. My Muslim friends are very entertained by asking how old my parents were when they got married. When I tell them my mom gave birth to her first child in her 30s, they shake their heads and respond “People in your country like to get married late, but we’re different- we get married early.” This is usually followed by a reminder that fertility begins to wane in the 30s for women, whereas men can have children their entire lives. In their minds, marrying late is too risky- you don’t have enough time to have a lot of children. One of my neighbors Valerie is still single at 32, and she says it’s lonely for her in Mora; other women laugh at her and it’s hard to find friends her age. In contrast, men are in no hurry to get married. No one makes fun of my single male friends in their mid-30s. People see lifelong fertility as permitting men the liberty to marry late and continue to take on more wives and children even in old age.
As for the actual marriage ceremony, I have been to four Muslim marriages so far, which was fascinating. For the first two I went only for the dance party at night, but for the third I was one of Nadia’s bridesmaids, so I got an intimate look at marital traditions. Nadia is my next-door neighbor, and the whole week before the wedding her house was crowded with a posse of female relatives baking gateaux and helping with preparations, A couple days before the wedding, she had our equivalent of a bachelorette party, where the bride invites female friends and relatives to admire her dowry, paint their hands and feet with henna, braid their hair, and dance late into the night. The day before the wedding, after a bride and bridesmaids photo shoot, we all piled into cars to create a motorcade following the bride to her husband’s village. Upon arriving in the village, we drove loops around town honking and making as much noise as possible to announce her arrival. The bride, swathed in veils from head to foot, was carried across the threshold of her husband’s house by her aunt, to be hidden in the bedroom until her wedding banquet. The females took up vigil outside the house and danced most of the night, while all the men waited with the groom at his father’s house. For the day of the wedding, there was a huge banquet cooked by the women and much dancing around the couple to anticipate their wedding night.
Once married, Muslim women in the North are supposed to be submissive to their husbands. In most households, this means they are confined to the house and treated in many ways as their husband’s property. I had a second revealing chat with Mohamet, who is the older brother of my friend Aicha and is training to be a high school teacher. He asked me what I thought about the life of women in Mora. I told him I saw the fact that women are confined to household chores and that female education is not a family priority as huge barriers to development. I asked him his opinion. He began by explaining that Muslim men like himself are very possessive of their wives; they like to have their wives always on hand to meet their every need. They do not think it is good to have women going out wherever and whenever they please, because then “it seems as if she is not married, does not belong to her husband.” She appears as a “loose woman.” According to their religion, women should be like their “children.” (He did say that he would permit his wife to work, and claimed that the high level of unemployment contributed to women staying home because there are few job opportunities).
In essence, men keep their women close to them out of fear of losing them to another man. Women have to ask their husbands permission to do anything outside the house. In Mora, cases where women are forbidden from leaving the house altogether are rare, but generally, unless they are going to the market or visiting friends or family, they are at the house. Unless it’s market day, you see few women in the center of town. Society is segregated. Women are not allowed to go to the mosques to pray; they pray privately instead. Women eat separately from men, even their husbands. You never see husbands and wives together in public, as at all holidays or ceremonies there is a women’s section and a men’s section.
Male possessiveness is also reflected in the clothing; the female uniform is wrapped skirts that are limiting to walk in, and nothing is form-fitting. Women keep their heads covered and frequently wear veils and an extra piece of material around the torso. Young girls can wear pant and tunic ensembles, but they are a recent trend and I’ve heard mothers scolding their daughters for wearing pants too often. For me, it is always a relief to wear pants after wearing the traditional wrap skirt. My neighbors have complained to me that American stars show too much skin, making them “bad women.” Notably, I’ve seen a grand total of 5 hijabs since I’ve been here; apparently extremist villages near the Chadian border keep their women completely covered, but in my area you almost never see women with their faces or ankles covered.
Traditionally, women do not question their husband’s wishes, either. As one of the Muslim women in my neighborhood told me, “A lot of times there’s no dialogue with the husband. You’re supposed to accept what he says. If he says it’s white yes it’s white even if it’s black. You’re not supposed to reason or object, or ask questions.” (She went on to say this is not good, that she tells her children that there has to be dialogue). This obedience is taken to the extreme in certain Muslim villages. You visit the household and the women will hand you water from a crouching position, then kneel timidly with their eyes on the floor. On these visits, I can see how people from the South can claim that Northern women are “slave-like” in their submission to their husbands. In Mora, their obedience is much less literal/obvious. Still, I once witnessed a boy in my living room explain to his little sister that she had to sit on the floor and let him sit on the chair because “you’re a woman.”
It’s mesmerizing for me watching women do their daily chores. They’re so accustomed to housework that it becomes like a choreographed dance. Their hands fall easily into familiar movements, and each task is done perfectly. I’ve sat struggling to wash my own clothes by hand, envying the graceful and effortless gestures of my neighbor’s daughter. Domestic prowess is linked to social status. Stories of those who cannot keep a good house are popular in gossip circles. My friend Nessa was sent back to her mother after only a few weeks of marriage because she couldn’t make sauces to her husband’s satisfaction, much to the amusement of the neighborhood women. My neighbors still laugh over the one time I bought the wrong type of sauce ingredients at the market.
A married woman’s second and primary task is giving her husband children- lots of them! Childbearing begins immediately after marriage. In fact, according to Muslim tradition, newlywed women must not supposed leave the house until they have given birth to their first child. And that’s just the beginning; many women here give birth almost continuously. It is rare to find a woman who has less than four kids. One village woman told me she has 5 kids, and wants 5 more. The majority have their first child by the age of 20. When you look around the market, most of the women you see in their 20s or 30s are pregnant or have babies in slings on their backs. My friend Catherine who works at a hospital said she has heard women complain that they do not want any more babies, that their husbands need to understand that they do not want to be always having babies. But having a large family is a source of pride and a demonstration of wealth. Villagers have also told me, “We have so many kids because we don’t know how many will survive.” They love making the contrast between African families and the American nuclear family portrayed on TV, laughing at parents who stop at kid number 2.
To complicate matters, polygamy is common in the North. Polygamy is officially recognized under Cameroonian law- men are allowed up to 4 wives (this is not necessarily rigorously enforced, the chief of a mountain village near Mora has 50 wives!) Generally, the more wives you have, the higher your social status, but polygamy is not just for the rich- in some areas men have multiple wives to use as a labor force for their fields. I’ll meet village chiefs who tell me proudly that they have recently added another wife (who is usually a lot younger than they are). A rich merchant in my neighborhood has four wives who live in a row of houses behind the main house, each of whom has more than 7 kids! Rich men sometimes house their wives in different houses, though, since the fact that your husband could pick up another wife at any time obviously can create a lot of drama; co-wives do not always get along, the first wife abuses the second, the husband does not give them equal attention, etc.
To further complicate things, divorce is very common among Muslims. Many of the Muslim women I know were divorced and remarried multiple times. One of my friends lamented that in the past men had to pay a lot to get a woman, and were more motivated to keep their first wife, not being sure of finding another, but nowadays marriage is easier (how exactly she didn’t say) and men frequently discard older women for younger. Legally it must be at the initiative of the husband, so women use disobedience to convince their husbands to divorce them. For example, Nadia is already not getting along with her husband, so she has returned to stay at her mother’s house without his permission in the hopes that he will divorce her. My colleague is a recent divorcee and friends say she was too outspoken with her husbands, too much for them to handle, too much “like a man.”
In a culture that encourages early marriage and frequent childbearing, education is not a priority for girls. The education rate for women is much lower than men. In poor families that cannot afford to send all their children to school, only the boys receive an education. As one of my colleagues put it, families are less willing to invest in daughters because the daughter will married off into another family. In other words, she won’t belong to us for long, she won’t stay and help support our family, so why should I invest in her? There are significant numbers of girls in primary schools, but beginning in high school the amount of females enrolled in school goes way down the higher up in the grades you go, as girls drop out to get married. As their daughters enter puberty, parents get worried their daughter will get into trouble or attract unwanted attention. Some parents try to justify interrupting their daughter’s high school education by saying that she can continue school after marriage if her husband permits it. In practice, however, this is very difficult and rarely happens. There is no night school for women who want to continue their studies in spite of kids and household chores. My friend Nadia said she would continue school after marriage, but she has already given it up.
This leaves women dependent on male relatives for cash. Women are not expected to work to support themselves before or after marriage. Girls see marriage as the only way out of their parent’s house. Before marriage, they receive money for personal affairs from their beaux, fathers, or other male relatives. Once married, women generally have no control over the family income and are dependent on their husbands. At the same time, they are not allowed to inherit land or money under Cameroonian law. Therefore, if anything happens to their husband, they become dependent on the inheriting male relative. The money left by Tata’s deceased husband is managed by his brother and his 18-year-old son. My friend Amaya complains that she asked her husband to let her take computer classes, but he refused, and when he later died she consequently had no way to support herself.
With little access to education, women have no access to political power either. In the entire region of the Extreme North I’ve been told there’s only one female sous-prefet. Village women are lucky to have national identity cards that permit them to vote. Women are very uncomfortable speaking in the presence of men. When I hold village meeting, I have to ask that the women participate in the discussion. Otherwise, they will only sit silently in the background. When I was working at a primary school, we needed a « patron » or boss for our skit, and the male teacher assisting me interjected, “It’ll have to be a boy then.”
You see, then, the cultural faux pas that is a young female Peace Corps volunteer living by herself and working without a male counterpart, biking everywhere and exercising in shorts every morning! I stick out even more when I don’t cook at home, and eat out with men at roadside stands. For the most part, Cameroonians accept me as an anomaly, as an example of “how they act over there in the West.” There are the occasional discriminatory remarks sent in my direction that drive me crazy. For instance, the women in my compound tell me “You go out too much ! You should stay at the house.” My male neighbor teases me “Go wash my dishes!” because he knows it bothers me. Cameroonian men often talk to me in a high voice and call me “cherie,” as if they are cooing to a little girl. Several of the male politicians I worked with on my trash project did not take me seriously at all and made very condescending comments. During my first year, I was constantly asked why I am not yet married, and had men make a point of calling me condescendingly “mademoiselle” rather than “madame.” I sometimes catch myself being more domestic or “womanly” than I normally would be, just because all the woman around me are! I have trouble connecting with some of the women I meet, because they don’t think for themselves, they let men make decisions for them, and they have no ambition beyond finding a good husband who will spoil them and keep them sheltered like precious flowers as they bear children.
That said, the North is much less conservative than I had expected. I had assumed that in a Muslim majority area the women would be much more covered up, the men more oppressive. I envisioned outspoken women being ostracized or feeling a patriarchal shadow of disapproval for crossing societal boundaries. I worried town leaders would publicly condemn certain behavior, or that parents would not like their daughters to spend time with me.
But it’s not like that, as my mom remarked when she visited me. We observed that there is a definite live-and-let-live attitude that gives society a much looser, more relaxed atmosphere. As in, if you want to act Westernized, “We’ll laugh at you because we think you’re weird but if that’s what you want to do then ok.” People don’t make a big deal out of things.
For instance, in Extreme Muslim countries you wouldn’t be able to ride on the back of a moto with a man, while in Cameroon, women do it all the time. Women are starting to drive motos, too, and the elders accept it with an indulgent smile. Girls play sports at school and even occasionally in the neighborhoods. Women are fairly exposed in their shoulders and other areas, relative to Middle Eastern countries.
And I do not wish to give the impression that the women here are meek or timid or “suppressed.” Women here are amazing, full of personality. In my mom’s words, “They’re gorgeous, and there’s a real joy about them.” My closest friends here are female. I’ve seen lots of women in town give men a piece of their minds. Women here can have very sharp tongues. Just the other day a woman dressed down our driver when we almost had an accident on the road to Maroua. Also, workwise, I’ve had the most success working with women. I’ve found women to be much more open to development than men. They are much more willing to try new things, accept new ideas, etc. I’m not the only one; even male PC volunteers have told me they’ve had the most success with womens’ groups.
Northern men, in contrast, aren’t very active in terms of community development. I’ve had men tell me that development is “women’s stuff.” When my mom arrived, she asked me “Where are all the men?” You don’t see them around the neighborhoods often, don’t see them interacting with their kids very much. They go to work and they hang out on mats near the mosque with their buddies, and that’s about it. As I was saying above, men do not act as if they are threatened in the face of an accomplished woman or Western influence. You could chalk that up to an acceptance of differences, a cultural openness, but it could also be a sign of general apathy.
Happily, I have seen signs of progress on gender issues during my time here. Many people tell me that early marriage and polygamy are becoming things of the past. The marrying age has risen already while the number of wives has decreased. I’d go so far as to say people are starting to look down on marrying young as “pas bon.” Many mothers I have talked to promote monogamy. They say they do not want their daughters to marry early into a polygamist relationship like they did. They would rather see them finish high school, and take their time in choosing a husband, so as to avoid divorce.
Likewise, most high school students you talk to will tell you they want to be monogamist, and that polygamy was for their parents’ generation. Many young girls tell me they want to finish high school before marriage (Still, not many see themselves going to university…or getting a job. They’ll say they want to find a husband who will allow them to work. Lots of teenage boys I’ve met say they will let their wives work, as if they are being progressive, which I suppose is a step…). People are also beginning to see the value of having less children. They’ll say to me, “It’s not good to have more children than you have the resources to provide for. People en brousse don’t understand that.”
The very fact that Cameroon now celebrates a national day for women is a step forward, as the whole week of the holiday involves discussions and debates over the status of women in Cameroonian society (I’ve had neighbors shake their heads and claim that women use the holiday as an excuse to act loosely!). And there is much foreign pressure for women’s advancement. All development projects funded from abroad have in the cliff notes “must include women.” My NGO (CADEPI) has had better luck getting funding for projects involving women, and having a woman on their team has also upped their chances.
I have also met many amazing women who are pushing society’s limits. My friend Zara runs her own restaurant. There are a handful of women in town who run their own seamstress shops. Two of my colleagues, Madame Fadi Kadi and Aicha Moussa, I consider feminists for their time. Aicha Moussa put off marriage for her education through university, and is now a Project Manager for IUCN. She says that when men enter her office, they assume she is the secretary, and are surprised to find out that she is the boss.
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