COLVISEG LTDA AREA ADMNINISTRATIVA

Having described how language and literacy are used in practice in Mowo, it is now time to introduce in more detail the people who opened their lives and shared their views of literacy with me. This study would not have taken its present shape without their in- volvement.

As I explained in Chapter 3, after I had interviewed 24 residents of the village in 2006, I selected three of them to interview in more detail, visiting them each several times over a period of six months in 2007. I selected them on the basis of their willingness to be inter- viewed in the first phase of the study and also to ensure that my research covered both men and women, and people who regarded themselves as literate as well as those who described themselves as non-literate. I had originally intended to select two men and two women, of whom one of each would be literate and the other non-literate but the absence of literate women in my earlier interviews resulted in a final group of three rather than four people. I will present them in turn, including something of their lives as they described them to me and as I observed them, with a particular focus on their engagement with, and views of, literacy.

6.a

Amcey-Palah Rosaline

Rosalinewas one of my closest neighbours when I lived in Mowo. Her home, only about 100 yards away on the other side of a millet field from where I stayed, was a typical Mofu compound of four grass-roofed huts made of mud, like the wall which joins them to one another and forms an enclosure for the compound. Two of the huts serve as bedrooms and one as a kitchen. The fourth hut is a general-purpose storeroom.

Rosaline sleeps in one of the huts with her five children, three girls and two boys. She told me that Anne, her eldest was 10, and Sylvie was 6, but she was not sure of the age of Sabie her second child. Her two youngest children, Boniface and Viata, are boys. Boni- face was 4 and Viata a baby, having been born in December 2006.

Her husband, Jean Paul, sleeps in another hut. Like most people in the village, he is a farmer, growing millet, peanuts and cotton, but he also earns money as a tailor. Some- times when I visited, he was sitting under the grass shelter outside his hut, working at a Singer sewing machine which he rents and using his feet on the treadle to make the ma- chine stop and go. Three times a week, he straps it to the back of his bicycle and goes to one of the local markets in Mokong, Cembey or Durum where he carries out tailoring for customers during the day. Because he went to school as a child, he is able to read and write. This has evidently helped him with his tailoring and has enabled him to be given some responsibility in the cotton GIC where he has the role of making sure that the grow- ers bring their cotton at the right time to the place where it is weighed and collected together before being taken away to the cotton factory in Maroua. He can read and write in Mofu, as well as in French and Fulfulde, having been taught by Ken Hollingsworth some years ago.

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Rosaline is not sure of her age but she knows that she was born in Manguilda, another small Mofu village, a few miles north of Mowo on the other side of the mayo. She is the fifth of seven children. Her Mofu name was chosen by her grandfather and can be literally translated as “die outside”, a possible allusion to the sometimes reluctant descent of Mofu people from their homes on the mountains down to the plain (see page 55).

Figure 7: Amcey-Palah Rosaline with Viata

She told me that when she was six years old, her parents sent her to live with her grand- mother so that she could help her with her domestic and farming work. For this reason, she did not go to school, but as her grandmother lived in the area where Mofu-Durum is spoken, she is now able to speak that language. This language is closely related to Mofu-Gudur. She spent about ten years with her grandmother before marrying Jean Paul and moving to Mowo to live with him. She was not sure how long she had been married but she thought that it was about twelve years. In view of this chronology, I assumed that she was about 28 years old.

She has not lived anywhere other than with her parents, then her grandmother, and now her husband. She has never been to Maroua or Mokolo. She said she would be interested to go there and was disappointed that she had been unable to attend a recent diocesan church event in Maroua. Travelling is out of the question as she does not have an identity card. Since her marriage, she has been occupied providing for her husband, looking after the children and farming. She has plenty to do and she told me that at certain times of the year she is simply too busy to eat. Each morning she goes three times to the nearest water point to fetch water, carefully carrying it back in a galvanised bucket on her head. Until the water pump outside the school fell into disrepair in 2006, she was able to fetch clean

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water from there but when I returned early in the following year she was going down the slope to the well 200 yards away behind the Hollingsworths’ house. This, however, be- came unpalatable after soap had fallen in so she then had to go twice as far away to the mayo instead. Fetching water might take up to an hour in the morning. She would do the same in the evening.

Like all the women of Mowo, she cooks on an open fire and has to fetch firewood on a regular basis, finding it where she can on the mountain. There is no ready source of fire- wood nearby, so this task can take some hours. Normally she does this once a week on Saturdays as she is able to carry enough on her head to last the whole week, provided that it is of the type which burns slowly, but in the dry season she goes more frequently in order to build up a stock of wood for the rainy months when she is more occupied with her farm work. Apart from being time-consuming, it can also be a hazardous task and sometimes women are killed either by falling from trees they are cutting down or by be- ing crushed by rocks dislodged on the mountain.

She earns some money by brewing bil-bil, the millet beer enjoyed by both men and women in the area, and selling it in the weekly market in Cembey. Her main occupation, however, is farming, either for her own family or for other people, for which she is paid in cash or kind. Even in the dry season in 2007, when other people were enjoying a time of relative relaxation, she was busy taking care of an onion field on the other side of the mayo belonging to another person. This required constant attention to remove the weeds which grew rapidly thanks to the sunshine and the water irrigating the onion plants. She also had to make sure that the enclosure made of thorn branches around the field was kept intact so that goats did not get in. Although they do not eat the onions, they trample on them as they are eating the weeds. It is harder to keep out the cattle which are driven through the village and she was upset that in May, just before they were due to be har- vested, a lot of the onions had been eaten by a herd. She had not been able to establish the identity of the person responsible.

Farming is difficult and a lot of effort can result in little reward. In 2005, serious flooding destroyed the millet which she and her husband were growing in a field near the mayo so that they had to buy millet instead. Their cotton field had been inundated at the same time and they had had to sell two of their goats in order to pay for the fertiliser they had taken on credit. The farming season in 2006 had also been difficult for them. They had started to grow millet in a field which they had rented but the ownership of the field was disputed and finally taken from them by the chief without any compensation. They had ended up with only a quarter hectare which had produced only two sacks of millet, which she said was just enough for one person for a year. By February 2007, six months before the next harvest, they were already having to buy the millet they needed.

Whenever they can, Rosaline and Jean Paul also keep goats and chicken. She was pleased that a goat which I gave her produced two female kids, although unfortunately one of them died at birth. Goats can be sold for cash but they are susceptible to disease and in the absence of any locally available veterinary care, they can die suddenly, leaving their

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owners with no return on their investment. She and Jean Paul once had five goats die in an epidemic.

They are in a constant battle to obtain the money they need. She commented that people have to be more self-reliant now as in her view people do not help one another as they did in the past. She felt that in times past people who were hungry could go to work in some- one else’s field and they would be paid with a bowl of millet, but now such arrangements are more formalised. The employer is more careful to work out in advance what he will pay for the work done and often he prefers to pay in cash. In her view, people put their own needs first nowadays. For instance, they are reluctant to take in children in their ex- tended family who have been orphaned.

Personal relationships now take second place to the pressure of the need to get money. She remarked,

« Mais maintenant, si tu n’as rien, même la fille de ta maman, même un gars de ta maman, même ton père, lui-même qui t’as mis au monde, ne te considère pas. Ils considèrent celui qui gagne quelque chose. »

But nowadays, if you’ve got nothing, even if you’re the daughter of your mother, or the son of your mother, even your father, the one who brought you into the world, they don’t care about you. They only care about people who are getting money. (PD 150: 20 hard copy transcription)

Money is a real issue. People need money more than they used to, and if you are in need, it is harder to find someone who will lend money to you. She told me the story of a local man who had repeatedly refused to help poor people on the grounds that he did not have 5 francs to his name, only for him to be burgled and robbed of a substantial amount of money. I could not confirm the accuracy of her account but the fact that she told me this story was indicative of her attitude, both towards herself and towards other people whom she regards as being well off.

She feels that life is hard for poor people such as herself and Jean Paul.

« Toi qui est pauvre, tu penses à te débrouiller seulement pour manger dans ton ventre, tu ne penses pas à gagner plus pour être riche. »

If you’re poor, all you think about is getting by and just having something in your stomach. You don’t think about getting more so you can be rich. (PD 150: 22 hard copy transcription)

The pressure to obtain money is such that she believes that people have been led into breaking the law. In her view, the risk of being attacked and having your money stolen had increased. Her view was supported by my interpreter, Jean Claude who on regularly avoided a particular route through open country, as passers-by had been attacked there in recent years.

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Rosaline is a committed Christian and goes regularly to the Catholic church in Cembey on Sundays. She is a member of the church women’s group in her quartier and was a leader until 2006. This involved making sure that people were helping one another. She benefited from the care of the other members when she gave birth to Viata, as they brought firewood and water for her while she was recovering. As a mark of the impor- tance of her faith to her, she chose to be baptised in 2004 and she showed me the card which recorded her baptism by the bishop on 11th April, followed by her first commun- ion on the same day. With the encouragement of her priest¸ and as a prelude to her baptism, she and Jean Paul had been married in a civil ceremony a few weeks before. She showed me the certificate of her marriage in Mokong (see Fig 8, page 94).

She told me when I first met her that she was not able to read and write. She explained this as being due to her not having been to school, unlike one of her sisters and two of her brothers, one of whom is now a schoolteacher in Koza near the border with Nigeria. Nevertheless, I later realised that she is not completely without literacy skills. She is able to sign her name with a simple squiggle as she had done on her marriage certificate. She also told me that she could read numbers, although only write numbers up to 3. She could also tell the time on a digital or traditional clock, and could use mental arithmetic to cal- culate what to charge her customers in the market and what change to give them. She said that sometimes customers try to rush her in order to cheat her but she does not allow them to confuse her. When measuring out the quantity of seeds she needs when growing millet, she uses a standard traditional measure. Not knowing how to sew, unlike her husband, she said that she has no need of the literacy skills which he uses, but that she would learn them if it were necessary for her. She does not feel a great need to extend her literacy ability. She no longer receives letters. This had only happened when boys wrote to her as a teenager. She said that she can do what she needs to do with literacy, and for other tasks she can rely on her husband to help her.

In spite of having what she regards as an adequate level of literacy for her needs, she nev- ertheless feels a certain degree of frustration at not being able to do more. Here is an extract from my first interview with her on 15th March 2006, when Jean Claude posed a question on my behalf, asking her how she felt about being unable to read and write:

« Ça ne me plaît pas parce que les gens font et j’ai envie de faire aussi comme eux mais pas des chance. C’est mieux que tu me donnes du papier que je vois. Si je connais, je peux voir. »

I’m not happy at all, because people do it and I want to do the same as them, but there’s no way. It’s good if, when you give me something to read, I could read it. If I knew how to, I could read it. (PD 69: 612-616)

She went on to say that she would particularly like to read the Bible because people who can read Scripture know better what God wants them to do so that they can go to heaven. She also told me that being literate means that you can write letters without having to get someone to help you; unless you have a child who is literate, you have to find someone else and you have to give them something for doing it for you. Another advantage of lit-

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eracy is that you do not have to depend on what other people tell you; you can never be sure if someone is telling you the truth but, if you can read, you have a way of checking what they have told you. Being literate also means that you can write things down when you have to do, so that you do not forget them.

Figure 8: Rosaline's marriage certificate

When I asked her what she would do if she were literate, she replied that she could then teach other women to read and write. She could also sew like her husband and she would know how to grow things better, although she did not specify exactly how this would help. Even if she did not use literacy to earn money, she would still know what was written in books.

Nevertheless, it was clear that Rosaline was not an example of someone who had a strong desire to become literate and who was being held back by circumstances beyond her con- trol. She told me that she had, in fact, attended some literacy classes in French at her church in 2005 and 2006, taught by Madeleine, one of her neighbours. This, however, only became apparent on my last visit to her. Until that time, I had accepted what she had told me in our first interview in 2006, namely that she was too busy to go to the literacy classes at her church. This apparent conflict of information, together with the time it took her to tell me that she had been to literacy classes, led me to think that the classes were not of great significance for her and that she might be somewhat ambivalent about the