Sketch your country

I t is common to hear that ” if someone briefs you about Cameroon and you understand, then you weren’t well briefed”. I wanted to meet the challenge by asking children of six(6) to 12 years to sketch a map of their country…. Great was my astonishment in front of such realism!

With four(4) different inks; blue, red, black and green, these children reproduced images, contours, colours, shapes and realities of their daily lives.
The precise question was, what’s the shape of your country?

Here are the illustrated answers I had: a mother, a house, a television, a phone, a football, a tricolour flag, flowers, a dog, a market, motorcycles, cars, electric wires, a road, a swamp, a gun, a school and sun…

“If someone briefs you about Cameroon and you understand, then you weren’t well briefed”

No need to comment, I won’t add words to these drawings, everyone is free to interpret them. At the end of this drawing exercise, they asked what I was to do with their drawings because they wanted to show them to their parents or their teachers. I replied by saying; good idea but, can you borrow them to me so that i can show them to the future president of the republic of Cameroon?

Yesss, they answered in chorus, but before handing them to me, each of them took out time to write their names and ages at the bottom of their drawings.
All I had to do on my part was to fulfil my promise , while hoping that these children will one day see themselves in the future Cameroon which the president of the republic will have the huge task of redrawing..