CARDINAL TUMI’S EPISTLE TO THIEVES
I did not read Christian Cardinal Tumi’s letter to the Douala administrative authorities on the subject of the commandement operationel, which seems to have drawn from some quarters the absurd charge that the cardinal is a friend and supporter of robbers. But I did listen with rapt attention to the cardinal’s open letter to all thieves and hardened criminals, as read over the Catholic programme on CRTV last Sunday, 27th August 2000. From this letter I got a good gist of what the earlier letter was about.
Ave Verum Corpus, K.618: Six VersionsCardinal Tumi is someone very much after my heart, for his unwavering moral courage and audacity; his straightforwardness and promptitude in addressing the weighty issues of the day; which is not to imply that I consider him to be in any sense perfect or infallible. But whenever the cardinal speaks, he always does so simply, loudly and clearly, without any equivocation or circumlocution, without any undue utilitarian or consequential calculations, with only the inescapable logic and moral imperatives of the situation at hand. There are, indeed, very few individuals of such caliber in the world of our historical epoch and fewer still on this our rough triangle called Cameroon, but I know most of the few who do exist by name. But I am not here to sing cardinal Tumi’s or anyone else’s praises. You probably know me for my allergy to praise singing, both at the giving and receiving ends.
Cardinal Tumi has made an extremely important point in both of his epistles, to the bandits, on the one hand, and those charged with protecting all of us against them, on the other. It is this important point that I would like to amplify here, from the point of view of ordinary secular morality and human decency, from the point of view of an ordinary common citizen who considers himself first and foremost a Pagan, secondarily and circumstantially a Christian, someone with no mandate to preach to anybody and with no secular or sacred authority of any sort. From what I have heard and seen, from what I have witnessed and observed, Cardinal Tumi’s very important message risks being lost on most Cameroonians. There can be no harm in attempting to amplify its salient point.
The Cardinal’s cardinal point is that, while we should hate crime, and sin in general, we should love the sinner and the criminal and therefore seek their conversion rather than their damnation. Furthermore, while the criminal deserves to be punished for his/her crime, such punishment should be commensurate to the crime actually committed. An innocent person should never be punished unjustly. A fair trial and due process of law are therefore necessary before condemnation, sentencing and punishment. This is particularly necessary in the case of capital punishment or death because human life is of supreme value. To punish the innocent unjustly or the guilty without a fair trial is to violate their human rights, to deny them what is due to them as human beings. To administer capital punishment unjustly or without due and fair process of trial is to shed innocent blood which always cries to high heavens for retribution. All Christians and Moslems ought to know this and no Pagan needs to be told because all Pagans believe that the shedding of innocent blood surely calls for misfortune on one and one’s children and community. Even an atheist doesn’t need much persuasion to be convinced of this.
There is no doubt that banditry, armed robbery and ordinary thievery had reached alarming proportions in this country. I have myself been a victim, five bad times in the last ten years. And, when you have been a personal victim of thieves at any time and place, it is very hard to refrain from picking the nearest club or missile and going on the offensive when you hear that any thief is being chased or has been caught and is being beaten, anywhere at any time, even if you have no idea what s/he has stolen or whether s/he has even stolen or attempted stealing at all. This is the understandable psychological reaction, but it is not necessarily a logical reaction.
I don’t know about Douala, but the last week of August 2000 was a very bad one for thieves in Yaounde. I was at Elig-Edzoa the penultimate week, repairing my shoes by the roadside, when suddenly there was a commotion nearby and I saw a young man scampering and being hotly pursued by gendarmes. He sauntered over the roadside railings like a deer and continued running. One of the gendarmes took aim with his riffle, pulled the trigger, like a deer hunter, and the young man slumped down under the impact of the bullet. Everyone rushed to the scene with gleeful shouts of "On a tué un voleur, on a tué un voleur!" (If it had been a deer, some people, including me and all the members of the European Union, would have protested on behalf of ‘animal rights’. You have surely heard of the "lutte contre le braconnage" and how it came about in this country, haven’t you? In the near future, bush meat addicted Cameroonians will need to travel to Europe to eat venison in the specialized oyinbo restaurants that are licensed to serve it.). But this was not a deer that had just been shot. It was a member of the human species, otherwise called homo sapiens, a young Cameroonian, to be more exact, that had just been shot dead. I felt so sad, I went away, forgetting my shoes with the shoe mender who calls himself a shoemaker. Scarcely a week later, I have seen the blood of thieves (human blood!) flowing like a river, day after day, on the streets of Yaounde, at Melen (twice) and at Tsinga, thanks to the bullets of the special anti-crime squad charged with ridding Yaounde of all criminals before the Franco-African summit in January 2000.
The most worrying thing about these developments is that Cameroonians are generally cheering this broad daylight carnage on our streets, without stopping to think about the consequences and the implications for our collective psyche, for the present and future of our society. Every society has its undesirable elements, and a programme for ridding the society of these undesirable elements, however it is motivated, by genocide rather than by mastery, control and reformation, is always highly questionable. The CRTV people, who pompously but unconvincingly call themselves ‘the indomitable lions of the audio-visual world’, have been doing what they seem to know how to do best: uncritically singing praises, …of the killing gendarmes, this time around. This is no time for laudatory songs. This is a time for meditative silence. This is time to address ourselves to the question of how we got to where we are today and how we will get out of the situation we find ourselves in. How did it come about that our youth seem to exhibit bravery and daring only in the domain of criminality and that our armed forces seem to exhibit intelligence only in the art of pulling the trigger of a gun outside of a war zone?
Gobata
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