Burness Global: Stories

Graves (credit: Jeff Haskins)

Land is a complicated issue in Africa. It is one of the areas of African society where the colonial legacy still lives on. Rights claims to “ancestral homelands” often shift with the tides of political power. There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to who owns land, but the vagueness seems to clear up immediately when there is money to be made.

When you have land, you hold on to it.  This lesson was reinforced to me just a few weeks ago, while I was traveling with a few companions in Cameroon for a community site visit. Our vehicle had broken down about an hour outside of Yaoundé. It was just before 9:00 a.m. and since the weather was still cool, we decided to walk out of the forest and meet our pick-up vehicle along the way to our destination.

At the end of one road, we turned left.  The village center was hopping. Women walked to work or to fetch water. Older men sat under storefronts arguing, seemingly unaware of the three foreigners–an American, a French woman, and an Italian, covered in mud and sweat–walking out of the forest. Some teenagers hooted and hollered at us, perhaps trying to scare us.

The main street, though, had only a few storefronts.  One side featured a sign for a high-society-sounding “Americain Coiffure” barbershop nailed to a pole, but no barbershop was in sight.  On the other side, young men and women argued with motorbike taxis over fares to destinations farther down the road or maybe Yaoundé.

Americain Coiffure (credit: Jeff Haskins)

We walked farther. The road turned dusty. Many of the brick houses had large mounds in front, some covered by dirt, some by tile. It took me a few seconds to understand that these were graves. Some yards had two graves in front and one on the side. A large one designated adults who died, small ones were for children. We asked one of the scientists leading our group why people in the area buried the dead in front of their houses. “It’s a local custom,” he said. “So they can watch over the family.”

I wondered if there wasn’t more to it.

We approached a man carrying a machete and what looked like the trunk of an oil palm tree. In French, one of us asked, “Why do you bury dead here, in front of your house?”

He smiled. “So that they can watch over me and my family,” he said. “My father knows that he will be buried here, and he knows that he will watch over us and we will watch over him.”

But why hadn’t the village or a church set aside a plot of land for a cemetery?

“I’m not giving up my land for someone else’s family,” he said.

Perhaps that solved the mystery. Land was precious, and I thought to myself, it takes a village to raise a child, but you’re on your own when it comes to burying them.