Tourists once flocked to the rugged far north of Cameroon for its wildlife and spectacular scenery — until cross-border raids by Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram all but halted such visits.
“Before we had many tourists, but people are afraid to come now,” said Moussa Ali, who has a stall at a craft market in Maroua, the main town in the Extreme North region, a strip of territory between Nigeria to the west and Chad to the east.
A handful of potential customers, mainly Cameroonians, stopped by Ali’s stand, but he said he can “go for two weeks without a single sale. It was above all the white people who gave us a living.”
Photo: AFP
During the October to March dry season, Waza National Park — famous for its elephants, giraffes and antelopes — drew several thousand visitors a year, until fear of Boko Haram activity dried up the flow almost two years ago.
“You’ll cross the border without even knowing it,” local guides used to tell visitors, until the far side of the frontier became considered dangerous and security forces declared the area a “red zone.”
A further blow in a region hitherto considered remote, but peaceful, came with the kidnappings last year of a French family of seven, including four children, and then of another Frenchman, Georges Vandenbeusch, both claimed by Boko Haram.
Photo: AFP
The hostages were freed, but the incidents brought a standstill to tourism, which had been a key source of income for many villages across the region.
Maroua and its population of more than 200,000 has also been hit hard by the drop in tourism, which gave secondary work to many in the informal sector.
While Ali said he was “no longer afraid. The army reassures us. Since there have been a lot of soldiers in town, we feel safe,” fellow trader Amadou Bachirou warned that “Boko Haram aren’t far away. They hide out in the bush, we know it.”
Bachirou lost several members of his family when the extremists attacked the Nigerian border town of Banki in September.
“The impact is catastrophic in economic terms,” Cameroonian Ministry of Tourism spokesman Serge Eric Epoune said. “Tourism and crafts are a dead end, and let’s not even talk about the hotel business.”
“The whole region is being stigmatized in the Western media. There is an exaggerated panic, since only a very small part of the Extreme North is affected by insecurity caused by Boko Haram,” Epoune added.
On its Web site, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs urges French nationals to stay clear not only of the Extreme North, but also of the North and Adamaoua provinces to the south.
“All French people still present in this zone are urged to leave as soon as possible,” Paris stated, warning that citizens’ safety “is no longer ensured.”
“Things were already difficult because Cameroon is not a destination that comes naturally to tourists, but now it’s worse. People really tend to confuse Cameroon and Boko Haram,” according to Annick Tchan Gang, a Frenchwoman who heads a travel agency in Yaounde and has lived in Cameroon for almost 25 years.
Gang said she has not sold a trip to the north “for months,” but added that “this country is still exceptional, like a miniature version of all of Africa,” ranging from dense tropical forest in the south to great sandy beaches in the west and arid savannah in the north.
With the far north virtually shut down, travel agencies have taken to offering cultural tours such as “the path to traditional chiefdoms and kingdoms,” or encounters with the pygmy people living deep in the forest.
The people of the Extreme North feel deeply abandoned. Even before the Boko Haram raids, the barren region where farmers grow cotton and millet figured a low 65 percent on the UN Development Program’s poverty scale in a 2010 report. The contrast is stark with the south and the west, where the economy is far more dynamic.
Locals are also suffering from an end to trade with Nigeria, which provided a large number of key goods and manufactured products when cross-border activity was easy. Gas was much sought after then and today there are often shortages. Even aid and infrastructure projects have ground to a halt.
Work to repair one of the main roads in the north, which has fallen into a state of neglect, has been closed down since 10 Chinese workers were abducted at Waza in May last year. The men were later freed, but the construction site remains abandoned.
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