Cameroon – praag.org

Mayor of Paris, minister call for ban on French comedian Dieudonne

The mayor of Paris is also calling for comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, known for his anti-Jewish humour, to be banned from performing in public.

France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, voiced his displeasure first in wanting Dieudonne, as he is known, banned from the stage.

The well-known comedian, started out years ago with a Jewish partner in sketches that mocked racism.

But in 1997, he fell out with Elie Semoun over money owed to him.

He has now joined the political right and alienated some fans with anti-Jewish comments. Dieudonne maintains that most people find joking about blacks in order, but not humour about Jews.

His latest joke about gas chambers has irked Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe, who likened Dieudonne to a criminal who “defends crimes against humanity”.

“We must ban the performances” he said, echoing recent comments made by interior minister Valls. Valls himself has been accused of discrimination after he said in September that Roma did not want to integrate.

Dieudonne has already been fined a couple of times for defamation, insults, hate speech and racial discrimination, and over his salute, called the “quenelle”.

The “quenelle” has been used by several personalities since, including footballer Nicolas Anelka, who recently used it to celebrate a goal.

But the 47-year-old comedian says the Holocaust gets too much attention to the exclusion of other crimes.

Valls, meanwhile, has said he wants to ban performances by Dieudonne on his nationwide tour this month, after the comedian joked about Jewish radio presenter Patrick Cohen.

“When I hear Patrick Cohen speak, I tell myself, you know, the gas chambers… A shame,” joked Dieudonne.

Despite the criticism, the comedian has scores of die-hard fans who feel he is unjustly being hounded by the media and politicians.

Dieudonne’s official page has 466,000 likes.

He won fans by exposing a well-known Jewish author’s denials of ethnic focus as flimsy and insincere.

The French-born son of a Cameroonian father and a white mother, Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala shot to fame in the 1990s in a double-act with his childhood friend Semoun.

He stood for EU-wide elections in 2009 on an anti-Zionist platform, describing Holocaust commemorations as “memorial pornography”.

But his shows at a small theatre in Paris that he manages attract packed audiences.

At his show on Thursday, the comedian joked about “kippa city” and “the banking slave master” to general hilarity.

Cameroon’s mothers ‘iron’ daughters’ breasts to delay puberty

Scene in Cameroon with Mount Cameroon in the background

by Anne Mireille Nzouankeu and Kristin Palitza

It happened a long time ago, two full decades, but Raissa Nana’s painful memories have remained fresh.

“My mother began to flatten my chest when I was 11. Every evening, she heated a stone in boiling water and pressed it on my breasts,” the 31-year-old remembered, her anger still written all over her face.

Dressed in a plain T-shirt that betrayed her flat chest, Nana recalled the physical abuse and humiliation she endured throughout puberty: “I cried out in pain, while my aunts were holding me down.”

By “ironing” her bust for years, the mother damaged Nana’s breast tissue irreparably.

The practice of “breast ironing,” in which mothers try to flatten their daughters’ developing breasts with heavy, heated objects is common in Cameroon as well as in many other West African countries, including Nigeria, Togo, Guinea, Chad and Ivory Coast.

Some women use stones or pestles to prevent breast growth, while others pound the tissue with heated plantain peels.

In nations where teenage pregnancy and rape are rife, trying to forcibly eliminate signs of puberty to protect their daughters seems worth the pain to many mothers.

A quarter of girls fall pregnant under the age of 15 in Cameroon, according to 2011 government statistics, while an estimated four per cent of women and girls are being raped.

“Mothers don’t want their daughters to get involved in early sexual activity, become pregnant and drop out of school,” explained Dr. Flavien Ndonko, technical adviser and anthropologist of aid organization German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) in Cameroon.

In a society, where discussing sexuality with children is a taboo for cultural and religious reasons, mothers resort to methods that have serious implications on their daughters’ health and psyche, according to Ndonko.

“They don’t realize how traumatizing breast ironing is,” he said. “It’s a very, very painful practice.”

But behavioural patterns are hard to change and myths difficult to set straight.

Even today, Nana’s mother, 52-year-old Emilienne, continues to believe the “benefits” of breast ironing outweigh the physical and emotional suffering it causes.

“I myself underwent breasts ironing. I did it to my daughter because I wanted the best for her,” she told dpa.

In Cameroon, 12 per cent of women have had their breasts ironed, according to a new study, for which GIZ surveyed about 6,000 girls and women between the ages of 10 and 82.

Contrary to general assumptions, breast ironing is not an old tradition. “It’s a social issue that is much more prevalent in urban than in rural areas. It originates from modern problems around sexuality,” explained Ndonko.

The psychological trauma the practice induces is immense.

“Girls get to understand that it’s not normal to have breasts, which has a long-term impact on their body image and sexual life,” said Ndonko.

“More than half of the women we interviewed associate breasts with shame,” he added.

Although Cameroon’s ministry for family and women’s empowerment classified breast ironing as a “violation of women’s rights” in 2011, the government has not legislated against the practice.

Eighty per cent of the women surveyed by GIZ said their breasts were permanently deformed by breast ironing. Nine per cent said they had difficulty breastfeeding their babies.

“We have seen girls developing cysts, infections, deformation and dissymmetry of the breast and psychological illness,” explained Sarah Ako, spokesperson of women’s rights group National Network of Aunties, which works closely with GIZ in capital Yaounde.

More than 10,000 women across Cameroon have joined the network to fight for the rights of younger generations. They run educational campaigns in schools, churches and on national radio to mobilize against breast ironing.

The good news is that the campaign has shown success. The 12 per cent of women suffering today from breast ironing represents a halving of the number in 2006, when an initial GIZ survey found that one in four women were affected by the practice.

“That’s a positive trend. It’s encouraging, but we’ll only be happy when we have zero cases,” said Ndonko.

Nana is one of the women who want to help break the cycle. As part of the Aunties network, she consults young women on issues relating to their sexuality.

Nana says she certainly won’t flatten the breasts of her own daughter, who just turned 14: “I don’t think it’s a solution to prevent premature sexuality.” – dpa

Another gay rights activist killed in Africa

A prominent gay rights activist in Cameroon was tortured and killed just weeks after issuing a public warning about the threat posed by “anti-gay thugs,” Human Rights Watch said.

Friends discovered the body of Eric Ohena Lembembe at his home in the capital, Yaounde, on Monday evening after he was unreachable for two days, the rights group said in a statement Tuesday.

One friend said Lembembe’s neck and feet looked broken and that he had been burned with an iron.

Lembembe was among the most prominent activists in one of Africa’s most hostile countries for sexual minorities. First as a journalist and later as executive director of CAMFAIDS, a Yaounde-based human rights organization, he documented violence, blackmail and arrests targeting members of Cameroon’s gay community. He was also a regular contributor to the Erasing 76 Crimes blog, which focuses on countries where homosexuality is illegal, and he wrote several chapters of a book released in February on the global gay rights movement titled “From Wrongs to Gay Rights.”

Lembembe is the most high-profile African gay rights activist to be killed since 2011, a year that saw the deaths of Uganda’s David Kato and South African lesbian activist Noxolo Nogwaza.

Homosexuality is punishable by prison terms of up to five years in Cameroon, and the country prosecutes more people for gay sex than any other in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Human Rights Watch.

In a statement, a U.S. State Department deputy spokeswoman deplored Lembembe’s murder. “We condemn this terrible act in the strongest terms and urge the Cameroonian authorities to thoroughly and promptly investigate and prosecute those responsible for his death,” Marie Harf said.

Lembembe was among the first activists in the country to mobilize following a sharp increase in anti-gay prosecutions beginning in 2005, said Yves Yomb, executive director of Alternatives-Cameroon, a gay rights group based in Cameroon’s largest city, Douala. A local office of the group was set on fire June 26, Harf said in her statement. – AP