Buea Coffin Riders

Every Friday, a horde of young folks troupe into Buea from adjoining villages on buses and on noisy motorcycles (bendskin). Their mission to Buea is for the weekly business of coffining a deceased friend or relative at the Buea Regional Hospital Annex mortuary. Weekends are generally favoured as they provide three days in a stretch to mourners. These mourners come into town riding on coffins.

Death has become a banal enterprise in Cameroon, as you would easily meet a two year old discussing dying excitedly and knowledgeably, things we of the days of yore dreaded even thinking about. People die for all sorts of reasons, motorcycle accidents, HIV/AIDS, stress and hypertension, suicide and all. The morose economic environment and the inability for most families to get their worth from life push them to the brink of nihilism and self rejection.

Brisk business is going on in Cameroon as undertakers thrive in providing services ranging from supplying coffins, providing hearses, funeral guards, hiring mortuaries, and entertaining and refreshing mourners after burial. Mourners and relatives of the deceased look for all means to excel by providing the best coffin and most grandiose funeral. According to Mola Ikome, “After Pa Kinge had worked so hard during his life, he should be given a befitting burial.”

Befitting burial is what Camerounese authorities are looking forward to giving the Pan-Africanist, Ndeh Winston Ntumazah on 27 March 2010. One needs to be in Bamenda on that day to judge the hypocrisy of many when it comes to funerals. For most people riding coffins noisily, beyond the show and sheer karma building, there is no meaning they attach to the momentary outpourings on funeral grounds. After abandoning someone in life, in sickness, what do we want to tell them with the outpouring of grief and the unreserved expenditure for coffins to catch the eyes of the ‘dead but living’?

Some of these coffins, made out of glass, aluminum and hardwood will cost the upwards of FCFA 150,000. Somebody just whispered to me that this amount will get only the cheapest coffin made out of stained white wood. Some folks do not hesitate getting coffins in the neighbourhood of millions, all in the name of a decent burial. Some mourners will be heard commenting that the coffin was the most beautiful and expensive. The dead hardly feel any difference in a coffin and what will a coffin of gold mean to Ndeh Ntumazah who had died since 2006 (when he became senile and could be heard asking what Nkraumah was doing), spiritually. In fact, before some people die physically, they would have already died long in advance, as their conversation will be about the dead than living.

It looks like most of us are long dead and we are only dead but living masses moving around and causing havoc to God’s people. Why do we have so many heartless people with dead consciences all over the place? They are dead but living. We are also dead but living when we invest only in the dead. Building mortuaries everywhere and allowing the dead to remain in the mortuary for more than 2 days is some form of desecration. Except for legal reasons, the dead should be allowed to continue their journey to the earth, dust and ash from which they came. Any delay is a travesty against their human right to prompt and decent burial. Some folks claim building mortuaries in their villages is development. This is only development of death and elevating it to an industry.

This raining season, hundreds of families have been dispossessed of their planting seeds by the serious hunger from the last two years. That is the death to be given a decent burial, poverty and hunger. Many will not be able to plant the fields because they do not have the seed s to plant. Next door to them tens of millions will be buried along some state personalities in the guise of state burials. The huge amounts used could be invested in farm seeds for poor farmers. That will be a development project not mortuaries and coffins.

Back to our Buea Coffin Riders (BCR), who have no other form of entertainment and showing off. They come in from small agglomerations like Ekata, Muyenge, Mamou, Ekona and Muyuka. Those places have no mortuaries. The BCRs usually accompany friends they called super bendskin riders, who unfortunately were killed riding. You need to see the way the bendskin speed on those roads to conclude that people die the way they live. Even when they die they give further reasons for people to dread and wish they were banned.

They put up macabre spectacles, with loose exhausts as they speed up and down the lone Buea Street with 4 to 5 passengers a bike. They accelerate like a space shuttle rocketing to its doom. While the escort speeds up and down a lone bus will carry other mourners and a coffin on the carriage. On the coffin, five young men will be sitting chanting loudly and waving leaves.

I tried finding out from Tebah why all the ambiance and wildness. “We have to sendoff our comrade in pump and noise. You know we bendskin are a lively and courageous bunch. We die once and die in noise. When we do not die we are maimed forever. It is better dying in active service and being sendoff professionally. Tebah said.

What a fatalistic conclusion. The karma of the occupant of the coffin is even made heavier by the five riders sitting over it. Every Friday, and sometimes Thursdays when I return to my mountain hut in Buea, I try to find answers to the uselessness of life in Cameroon as exemplified by the BCRs. Some of them even have to come to the mortuary on weekdays because the mortuary is so full and they have to create space for new bodies to be admitted. If dying does not mean a thing to anybody, then you may easily understand the attitude of the politicians who do not care about the plight of the common man. Week in week out, the coffins will be rode out of Buea with death a permanent visitor in town. Man has to conquer death by ignoring it and not celebrate it. When you ignore death, it dies from neglect.

By Christopher Fon Achobang