An hour after arriving at the gate, just after eight o’clock, we marched onto the plane headed to Brussels. Tickets checked, everything good, we were off! Except… the jet bridge was dark. In order to see I had to take out my iPhone and turn on the flashlight. Apparently the airport had forgotten to pay their electric bill; the airline attendants were pointing flashlights down the bridge to help us make our way safely. It’s so funny how that country has not improved one bit since I was a boy.
At 1:00 AM, as I slept on the plane, my mom’s head fell on my lap and woke me. I looked down at her. She was not okay. The lack of sleep, the stress, and the little amount of food she had been eating the past few days had gotten to her. As she lay on top of both Sylvie and me, we looked at one another and panicked a little. We got her water and started fanning her. She woke up a few times, but just passed out again. I was worried for her. I let her sleep on my shoulder and kept water nearby in case she woke and wanted it. Three hours later she finally woke up, feeling better.
After about ten hours of flying, at around 6:00 AM, we landed safely in Brussels.
I stopped and did some shopping as we walked through the airport mall searching for our next gate. Our flight wasn’t for another five hours. I ended up buying myself a nice (and very over-priced) sweater. At our gate there were enough empty seats on a number of comfortable-looking couches for us each to have our own space. (Thank you Jesus and praise the Lord!) We were finally able to stretch out and get some much-needed rest.
The flight from Brussels to America was long and uninteresting. I wasn’t tired and ended up having a nice conversation with a lady on the plane sitting next to me. She was funny and we talked long about the outdoors and other random things to pass the time.
Being back in Minnesota felt nice, both in body and in spirit. It was much less humid than Cameroon had been, and it was good to be back in America, where things weren’t 1970s-era in manner, technology, thought, or mentality. Now that I was grown I could even more clearly appreciate the differences between my young life in Cameroon and my existence in the United States.
As a child I was bedazzled by the sights and sounds of the idolized “America”; as a teenager I was self-involved (as teenagers often are) with hormones, growing up, and deciding who and what I wanted to be. But, now, as a young adult, and having been in Africa for a number of days to re-experience the life I’d known when I was a boy, I could see the obvious contrasts between the two worlds… and I felt a deep love for them both.
Not all of Cameroon is bad, but not all of America is good. There is a lot of promise in the people, the culture, and the soil of my homeland. Cameroon is isolated in many ways and for a multitude of reasons. In some ways its isolation makes it a curious and, at the same time, a spectacular place with clean air and no pollution and living. Real living, the kind of life and excitement and energy that people in America can sometimes only dream of.
In the States, we are surrounded by improvements that are too often not really improvements at all. We have cell phones and technology and new roads and skyscrapers and glamour and Hollywood and New York City… but we have become lost in it. Families are falling apart, communities don’t know how to talk to one another, neighbors don’t know each other’s names, gangs are everywhere, racism is not dead, and the list goes on. Even with all our big-headedness about our power as a country, America’s political system sometimes seems just as messed up as any of the systems in Cameroon.
Still, as I drove southward from Minnesota back home to my dorm in Florida, I had time enough to reflect on that last trip. I realized how happy I was to be able to see my family again and, also, how sad I was to see the man I once looked up to go away forever. My heart smiled when I decided for myself that I would, once again, return to Africa and stay there, live there, because, very simply, there is no place like home.
Mr. Fru Ndi (The Chairman) writing a message in my journal.
CHAPTER 15:
Ultimate Freedom.
“My future? That’s a secret which only God knows, but I can tell you it will be amazing.”
The dictionary defines freedom as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” This, in truth, is not the true and ultimate freedom available to humankind. Going to school—from kindergarten in Cameroon to college in America—I have always wondered what the purpose of a school-based education is. Society makes it seem like, unless you go to school, you won’t be accepted as a productive and good citizen, however no reason is given as to why you’re going to school other than for monetary and employment purposes. But is that really enough? This way of thinking made me resent school for many years; spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to try and earn it all back after graduating never made sense to me. Nonetheless, I’ve always gone to school and missed very few days because that’s what my mother wished of me.
Buddha once said, “There is no wealth like knowledge, and no poverty like ignorance.” This statement’s true meaning became apparent to me the first week of my sophomore year in college. I realized that the ultimate freedom available to us in this world is education.
Looking back in time, education has always been the biggest and most well-kept commodity of the rich and the powerful. In days of slavery in America, African-Americans were not allowed to own books, weren’t supposed to know how to read books, and weren’t allowed to share their knowledge with each other—they couldn’t even look in the direction of a school. And, in European history, there have been periods when literature and textbooks were destroyed in order to better control the people. Now, with those things in mind, education should become more relevant in our own lives, seeing as its value has always been great in the past.
In modern days, with schools commonly being free for all and many of them (mostly in the bigger, more diverse cities) being less than prepared to properly pass of knowledge along to young people, most students who go to school wonder what the true value is of an education, what the purpose is. The same students who wonder that will wonder why people in third world countries are smarter and usually end up as more successful human beings; they might wonder why their teacher or doctor is Indian, or Asian… or African.
The simple reason is that third world countries value education a lot more than modern countries like America do. This is because education is not free in most instances and, secondly, it’s not easily accessible. In America, we have free school, free school buses, free food, but still the education most American students receive cannot compare to an Indian student’s, or even a Cameroonian’s for that matter! Coming to America, I knew everything the schools were teaching the students in four grades ahead of me… and I was one of the dumbest in my Cameroonian school, failing Class 5!
After going through a public school in America (and in one of the most diverse and least funded schools in Minnesota), I started adopting the mentality that many other students in my position had: I began to believe that, as long as I tried, I could say I had done well. In Cameroon, there is no try; there is only “do” and “don’t”. If you got anything less than an A or a B, you’ve failed. That is the standard that is set in third world countries because if your parents are going to pay for school, you’d better do a great job or else your parents will deal with you very swiftly.
With that said, why did I come to the conclusion that knowledge is the true and ultimate freedom? The simple answer to that question is this: knowledge is the only freedom which cannot be taken from you.
Legal freedoms, as we know so well in the United States, can easily be taken away from you. For example, there are laws in Florida and Texas which limit who can vote or not, and laws in New Mexico which stop people from driving who might be carrying illegal alliances.
Monetary freedom—even though everyone seems to focus so strongly on it—is probably the easiest to take from someone because it can be accomplished via taxes, divorces, lawsuits, theft, etc.
What we are left with is educa
tional freedom. This freedom alone gives you the ability to see the world as it truly is, to see with your own knowledge and without relying on how others may tell you to see it. This freedom makes legal freedom easier to acquire because you know and understand the situations and what your actions can mean in the legal system; this freedom is not only a privilege, but a tool that allows you to acquire as much money as your heart desires, as much as your mind can motivate you to go after. Educational freedom makes you the most free of men on this planet. Freedom is something many have to fight to get. “Freedom” is America’s selling point but, in truth, with educational costs going up and educational quality going down, it is very hard to see how we are truly a nation of free men. In reality, America is not a nation of people who are free by default; what they choose to learn makes them more or less free. America is a nation of opportunity for people to use their educational freedom to acquire financial and legal freedom.
So, if you’re ever in a class, wondering how any of the knowledge you’re acquiring will matter in your life, the answer is very simple: it’ll give you freedom.
Tomorrow is a new day, and it’ll be a better day if you understand the world you live in and how it works around you. Don’t let some rapper make you believe that money is freedom; don’t let a drug dealer or a corporate mogul tell you that they’re free because they’re wealthy. In truth, they are slaves to their money. Don’t let anyone tell you that just being American means you’re automatically free. Let them prove to you that you’re more free than anyone else and then when they achieve true freedom, don’t laugh at them. Don’t let anyone, not even the government, take away the knowledge you deserve, not as a person belonging to one country or another, but as a human being. What is the point of living on this earth for 60, 70, 80 years, if not to understand it?
Mario Novak once asked, “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” And he was right.
Knowledge is freedom. Go out in the world and be free, for tomorrow is another day to live the life our parents intended us to have.
CHAPTER 16:
Lingering Questions.
“Why this world, why life, why our existence are all questions we ask.
The answers, if you pursue them, are inside you.”
Every time people hear my stories they always have questions to ask, whether about my past life in Africa or about how I enjoy being in America. I do not expect that these short stories have in any way answered all or even most of the curiosities you might have about such things.
Following are a list of questions I get asked over and over again. They’ve become so common in my storytelling experiences that I feel it’s safe for me to assume that you may wonder about the same things. So, in an effort to satisfy any lingering curiosities, I’ve supplied answers as content for my last chapter.
What do you think your life would be like if you still lived in Africa?
If I still lived in Cameroon I can tell you it would be no joke and my life would not be very fun. I already had depressing and suicidal thoughts as a nine-year-old living in that country just before I left it to come to America. I strongly feel that, had I stayed there, I would have given up on life long ago.
How has being from Africa influenced your life in America?
Being from Africa is the best thing I could have asked for as an American now. As an immigrant, it helps knowing where you came from, what type of life you lived before; it helps because you know that, no matter what, you’ve left the worst of your life behind and you can work hard to move forward. America is, after all, the land of opportunity! Knowing where I came from makes me thankful every day that I get to live here, and I take every opportunity I can to reach what is my American dream: a happy home, food on the table, and possibly even a family.
Do you plan on going back to Africa? If so, how often would you go?
I have no current plans to go to Africa. The trip there is expensive, and at this point I have a lot of unfinished work to do before I can feel good about finally going back home. Cameroon is where I am from, and I do plan on returning there once I have finished here what needs to be done.
How much of your family lives back there? Are you still in contact with them?
Most of my immediate family lives in Africa and only a small portion of them live here in the US. I’m not in touch with those in Africa as much as I probably should be. I was not very close with my extended family; I always fought with them, and so I do not really stay in contact with them.
What languages do Cameroonians speak?
Cameroon, like Canada, has two official languages: French and English. These are the languages that most people in the country speak, just only those living outside the cities. However, in addition to French and English, outside of the cities there are over 30 different village-specific languages and dialects that are spoken.
How hard was it for you to learn English?
English took me a little over four years of learning to understand it. Speaking English, though, came to me fairly easy because we did a bit of that in Cameroon. Learning to write and read English were the hardest things about coming to America.
What is life like as an African immigrant in America?
It is not easy. People are not as friendly to outsiders as they could be. I’ve gotten some negative comments from people in Minnesota who I otherwise thought were quite nice. People will sometimes surprise you like that. There were teachers, students, and even some parents who talked down to me because they felt (whether consciously or not) they were better than me; it becomes apparent after a while that the common conception is that immigrants are stupid. But, there are a lot of good people around, too. Some people, like my grandparents, are so friendly to outsiders that you would think they’ve known you for years. America is full of contradictions like that—people who are hateful for no reason mixed with people who love you from the start—which is why I believe living in America can be very hard but also a blessing.
How has living in America without a dad or a father figure directly affected your life?
My mom was amazing at raising me in a well-rounded way, and my “adopted” granddad has been a great influence, as well as my church’s minister, Pastor David. But, simply, I don’t feel I’ve ever been absent a father figure while in America; there are so many great men in my life who have been father figures to me who I’ve been able to learn from.
Being African, how do you think getting a job in America is different for you than for other people?
Simple answer: I have to work twice as hard. That is, in order for me to get a job over someone else, I have to be twice as good as everyone else. My resume must be twice as filled and I must have references that say I am the most amazing employee anyone has ever had. Otherwise, the likelihood I will get the job is be very slim.
How does it feel to be discriminated against?
I have grown to live with the constant discrimination I receive. Living so close to Alabama, people are naturally a little more racist here than in Minnesota; I experience levels of uncomfortable moments that I am not used to on a regular basis. People see me and I can tell from the stares and the way they are looking at me that they really don’t want me there. One time I was out with my fraternity brothers to an event we were having with a sorority. Because of where we went out, I knew that if I strayed from the group I would literally be putting my life at risk.
Do you prefer African girls over American girls?
This question is asked so often that I thought it’d be important that I answer it here: I have absolutely no preferences to any ethnic group. Many Africans are known for mostly dating American girls and rarely interact with their own ethnic groups. I think diversity is great, and that if a person limits themselves to dating one ethnic group they’ll really miss out on experiencing so much the world can offer. Relationships allow you to share with other people’s life experiences so you can better understand the world through som
eone else’s eyes, someone who isn’t like you. So, having a relationship with only American girls or only African girls limits a person to experiencing the culture of only a very small population of the world.
Do you consider yourself African or African-American?
I am born an African and I will always be an African. That is why my book title is African in America, not African-American in America.
If you were to go back to Cameroon to live permanently, what do you expect life would be like there for you?
It would be a very real struggle. I am so used to having the Internet constantly available to me and I have such a busy life that going back to Africa and living there permanently would be a very hard thing. I do plan on going back and living there, but only part-time; I don’t think I could live there full-time.
What do you think of education in America versus education in Africa?
It’s a joke. America, being so rich and powerful, has below-average education compared to the rest of the world. Students from Cameroon compared to students from the United States, in the same grade… no comparison. Africans learn what Americans learn only much more quickly and at a younger age. It also helps a lot that Africans know that if they don’t do well in school they will have no future; while, in America, there are many other roads to success which do not involve a formal education.
Were you excited to come to the United States?
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