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Day and Night in Limbo
(2014)
With humour, insight and irony, Lonkog recounts the joys and contradictions of daily life in a Northern Cameroon village. Living in Carrefour Poli in Northern Cameroon was never easy. How far will one have to go for drinking water during the dry season? Will there be money for kerosene to fill the lamp tank? For batteries for the torch? For a bowl of corn to make 'fufu' for the family? Will there be a night encounter with the poison of a snake or scorpion? The man of Carrefour Poli imagines when he last had a bottle of beer and when he will next have another. Children sit in class staring at the teacher, while their work suffers. People sit under trees for shade only to cut them down for firewood. Ministers run up and down, working very hard and sweating, but little changes. Day and night people turn around on the same spot. It takes a long time to build a nation. Everything is in limbo.
The Black Man and his Visa
(2013)
Tardif is the son of a medical practitioner, an herbalist and a spiritual healer in northwestern Cameroun. When his father eventually gives up his practice, his mother struggles to put him and four of his sisters through high school. But financing university is a challenge. Tardif works for seven years in the farms and as a school teacher and seeks help from all quarters of the globe to try to raise money for university in his home country. Then one day he finds himself in China - studying Chinese medicine - and hoping for a better life than the one he had in Cameroon. The predicaments are as challenging as they are profoundly instructive. Tardif poses as a Dutchman and as an American to get jobs teaching English and survive in his host country. He ends up earning the respect of his students and employers, but not without everyday encounters with precarity. Just as one problem is resolved, another always seems to be brewing on the horizon. Tardif autobiographically opens his adventures, his transformations and his musings on Chinese and African ways of thinking and living to those interested in intercultural mobility and learning about life. His story reads like a dairy and keeps one wondering what will happen next.