Pain Only Visible Deep in Their Eyes : Cameroonians Hold Back the Tears

YAOUNDE, Cameroon —  Perhaps the most striking shortage here in the wake of last week’s toxic gas disaster was one of tears.

Compared with the almost frantic efforts of the outside world to rush aid to the stricken in northwest Cameroon, the Cameroonians appeared amazingly stoic in the face of a natural calamity that claimed at least 1,500 lives and virtually wiped out three villages.

While one encountered shock and sympathy among them in the days immediately following the disaster, the Cameroonians showed virtually no anguish.

Until midweek, the official government newspaper, the Cameroon Tribune, played the story a poor second to massive coverage of the state visit here of Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Pain Deep Inside

Even survivors who have lost most of their extended families in the tragedy seem to speak of it almost matter-of-factly. The pain was there, but only visible deep in their dark eyes.

The mourning will come, said Cameroonians and Westerners who know the country well, but because the tragedy disrupted well-established rituals of life and death, it is going to take time.

While it is difficult to generalize about a country composed of about 240 different tribes, or ethnic groups, as they prefer to be known, these observers say there are several reasons for what they described as a deceiving stoicism.

As elsewhere in the Third World, black Africans live close to death, and that shapes their attitudes toward it.

“It’s not fatalistic as much as it is a realistic understanding that once you are born, you will die,” said Gemuh Akuchu, an American-educated Cameroonian intellectual.

Life Expectancy Only 47

Even here in Cameroon, which is one of the region’s most developed nations, average life expectancy is only 47. And with an infant mortality rate of more than one in 10, death is considered almost as natural for the very young as it is for the old.

“Those first two or three years, and even four, you’re not really sure the infant is here to stay,” said Philip Noss, 46, a son of American missionary parents who has lived and worked in Cameroon off and on since 1948. “The child is ‘coming into life.’ ”

And as with the elderly who pass away, the young who die are seen as “going back” to some previous form of existence.

“It’s the people in between you have to find the explanation for,” said Noss, referring to the disaster victims.

Cameroonians typically seek answers in a combination of religion and superstition.

Mystical Explanations

“In a primordial or traditional society in transition, we accept scientific explanations,” said Akuchu. “But that hasn’t totally replaced traditional explanations, which are usually mystical or superstitious.”

“Even if you have all the scientific explanation of the geology and where the gas came from, you still don’t have the answer,” added Noss, who works as a translation consultant for the American Bible Society. “Why now? Why this late?”

Ngwang Gumne, chief of service for the community development department of the northwest province, which includes the disaster area, said most of those killed belonged to one of two groups, the Fulani and the Bamum.

The Fulani are nomadic herdsmen and mostly Muslim. The Bamum are village farmers and a mixture of Christians and animists--followers of traditional religions.

In any case, they place great importance on the ritual of death. “Mourning is a socially organized event,” said Noss.

Buried Near Homes

Typically, for example, Cameroonians are buried by members of their extended families, sometimes under their homes.

“If I drop dead right here, I would certainly be transported to my village and buried next to my home, in my father’s compound, near the house my father built there,” said Akuchu in an interview in Yaounde.

It is important to be close to those left behind, Akuchu added, because “in death you have a very important role to play--as a spirit, you are protecting that family.”

Beyond protection, the dead are seen as intermediaries between the living and their God.

“It’s a big problem with Christians here,” said another Yaoundan. “They say: ‘Why should I pray to a saint? I have my dead brother.’ ”

Death is traditionally a community concern. Normally, said Neal Walsh, U.S. Information Agency officer here, “any number of employees would be here saying: ‘I have to have time off. Someone from my village is dying.’ ”

Disrupted by Disaster

The nature of the toxic gas disaster disrupted all this. So many were killed so quickly that there has still been no time to cope either physically or psychologically with the important rituals of death.

Perhaps most disturbingly, many of the victims were simply buried in mass graves by the army to head off a very real threat of epidemic if the corpses were left for more traditional burial in individual plots.

“African literature tells us the dead are with us,” said missionary Noss. “They’ve not gone. And if they have been buried in an unnatural way, where does that leave us? You’ve somehow changed the relationship.”

Noss noted that typically “death is handled over a long period of time” here. He said he has seen memorials where “you might think somebody just died for the wail you hear. But it’s actually someone who died two months ago. It’s just that someone new from the family has come to mourn.”

Given the extraordinary nature of these deaths, Noss added, the adjustment will probably take even longer than normal.