Youth Day, February 11th

  Leader of a nursery school group in the march-pass.

                Youth Day is a significant holiday celebrated in Cameroon on the 11^th 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.

  Nursery school children marching.

  School children marching.

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.

  Impressive marching by a private school.

                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.