Cameroon
Constant Sabang
Africans dreaming of a better life shouldn’t look to America, said Constant Sabang in Yaounde’s Le Quotidien Mutations. Every year when the U.S. visa lottery comes around, thousands of Africans, among them many Cameroonians, apply for a chance to “become a nephew of Uncle Sam.” A few of them even win one of the coveted green cards allotted to African countries. But what do they find when they leave Cameroon? They have given up their national identity, not to mention their passports, to become second-class citizens. For black people, America is “not the land of opportunity.” Jobs, if they can be found, are of the most menial kind, and people with dark skin are still outsiders. Those images we saw on TV recently of inundated Louisiana and Mississippi present the true picture of America, not the glossy “Hollywood superproductions or promotional videos” that capture our imaginations. The footage of black people crying on the roofs of their shacks might as well have come from Niger or Sudan. For all its great wealth and power, the U.S. is at bottom a Darwinian society. It is “a jungle, where the strong feed off the weak.”
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