Youth Day is a significant
holiday celebrated in Cameroon on the 11th of February. There is a
ceremony where all of the schools and youth groups march past the delegates and
important figures of the town. Jacob, my post-mate, and I went to the football
field at 9:30am even though the program was supposed to have started at eight.
We were not at all late; we waited just over an hour for the ceremony to begin.
Once all of the grands or big men (important people in the town) had arrived
the program started.
First there was the raising of
the Cameroonian flag and singing of the national anthem. This is how all of the
national and international holidays start. The protocol and ceremony of things
is very important here. There is a way that things are to be done. After the
opening of the ceremony there were speeches given and then there was the
march-pass of the youth. The march-pass started with the nursery schools, then
the primary schools, secondary schools, technical schools, teacher training
schools, and finally the youth groups. There were many, many schools and only a
few youth groups. The march-pass took a long time because of all the schools
and groups that were represented. The nursery school students were so cute!
They marched with their knees coming up to their chests and their arms swinging
wildly.
Then there
were the private schools. You could tell which ones were private schools by
their marching technique, which was very good. There was one private secondary
school in particular that marched almost in unison. It was very clean and
sharp.
After the march-pass the schools
presented songs and then traditional dances. Once again the nursery school
children were adorable!
Although
some of the primary schools had great singers and some of the secondary schools
had impressive traditional dances;
There was
one dance where one of the dancers was up on stilts dancing. Then, as part of
the dance, he used a pole to lower himself to the ground and then used the pole
to pick himself back up onto his stilts. It looked terrifying (so terrifying
that I forgot to take a picture!). The crowd loved it, even though these things
are their own culture people still crowd around to see the dances and performances.
A note:
Whenever the audience likes a group of singers, dancers, performers, they
either drop money at the performer’s feet or stick it to the performer’s
forehead. And yes, this is done in the middle of the performance. This is a tip
for the performer and it means that that audience member is really enjoying
their performance. This was done several times throughout the day and there
really were some very good performers. I did not join in because I am still
trying to establish myself in the community and did not want to start off by
favoring groups.
