BAMENDA, CAMEROON – Neng Magha, 32, sweats profusely as she hurries to the food market at 5:41 a.m. in Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest region of Cameroon. A small coin purse bounces around her neck as she walks. She carries a flask of food in her right hand, while her left hand supports the weight of her 11-month-old son, whom she has strapped to her back with a piece of cloth.
Magha is a “bayam-selam,” or a small-scale vendor of goods, in Cameroon’s informal economy.
When Magha arrives at the market, she throws aside the plastic cover that protects her piles of Irish potatoes. Finally settled, she sits before her goods and places her son in her lap to feed him pap, a porridge made from corn flour, directly from the food flask.
“I became a bayam-selam when I was 22 years old,” she says with a smile while her son screams for food. “I started very small with just about two buckets of Irish potatoes and 10 yams. Today, I am grateful to God for making my business grow to this level.”
Magha dropped out of school before beginning secondary education. Her parents could not afford to continue schooling a daughter, she says.
Now she dedicates her life to providing her three children with the education she never had.
“Education is one of the things I admire the most,” she says. “My children will get it through me. I do this business to enable me [to] send my children to school and, thank God, I am helping my husband to do so.”
Magha earns a profit of about 30,000 Central African francs ($60) each week. She sets aside a portion of this for her children’s school fees, which total 71,000 francs ($145) each year.
But society looks down on bayam-selams and treats them as second-class citizens unworthy of respect, she says. The abuse is both direct and indirect. Once, she overheard a woman tell her daughter to stop behaving like a bayam-selam as a scolding for being careless.
The insults are difficult to bear, Magha says. She looks forward to the day when society views bayam-selams as respectable human beings.
Society considers female bayam-selams who vend at the market uncivilized and uneducated, and some customers treat them with contempt. But these women ask for recognition, saying that they work hard to provide their children with an education. To ease the friction between bayam-selams and the public, the Association des Bayam-Selam du Cameroun, an organization that represents these workers, offers sanitation and business training to bayam-selams to improve their reputations.
A bayam-selam is a person who engages in the business of buying and selling, says Mary Fomuso, the regional secretary of the Association des Bayam-Selam du Cameroun and a bayam-selam herself. In its broadest definition, the term includes tailors, grocers, carpenters and shopkeepers.
Under this definition, approximately 75 percent of the country’s population works as bayam-selams, she says. But women dominate the lower level of the bayam-selam sector. They often sell perishable goods on a smaller scale.
Male bayam-selams, on the other hand, are more likely to have the necessary collateral to qualify for loans. As a result, they are more likely to expand their businesses and to earn more money.
Female bayam-selams operating in the lower level of the sector say they endure disrespect from the public.
Society looks down on these women without understanding the sacrifices they make for their families, Fomuso says.
“Bayam-selams are underrated in society,” she says. “Meanwhile, they contribute a lot in the economy of the country and in the welfare of their families.”
Victorine Taah, 37, has sold plantains at the market for 15 years. Customers accuse her of dishonesty, she says.
“Sometimes customers call me a cheat just because I tell them the price of plantains,” she says. “It makes me feel really bad, but, well, I have learned to take customers for who they are.”
Melanie Nchang, a graduate of the teachers college at the Université de Yaoundé I in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, is the daughter of a Bamenda bayam-selam.
It hurts her when she overhears people make unkind comparisons to bayam-selams, she says. Even her friends make comments such as: “Why are you moving like a bayam-selam?” or “Why are you dressed like a bayam-selam?”
Her classmates were surprised to learn about her background and doubted that her mother was a bayam-selam, she says.
“Yes, they expected me to live in a low-cost hostel, dress poorly or cook poor meals,” she says. “The fact that I lived a normal life, like any average student, made them to think that I was more than a daughter of a bayam-selam.”
Society should treat these women with more respect, she says.
But Solange Kibot, a Bamenda housewife, says that female bayam-selams are uneducated and vulgar.
“Majority of bayam-selams are unhygienic, so rude,” she says. “And they don’t have respect for their customers. They talk a lot and care less about the feelings of others.”
They even gang up on potential buyers, Kibot says. She used to fear declining goods from bayam-selams after they named their prices to avoid drawing insults and taunts from them. These days, she returns their insults or gives them mean looks.
Female bayam-selams suffer from an inferiority complex, she says. They require more schooling and greater professionalism if they want society to take them seriously.
“Bayam-selams need to attend workshops or seminars on business management or something,” she says.
But bayam-selams say that their lack of education is what propels them to work hard to educate their children.
To pay for the education of her four children, Janet Bih, 42, arrives at the market at 5 a.m. to barter with farmers for the vegetables she will resell.
She became a bayam-selam four years ago to support her children following the death of her husband. They are the reason she endures the early-morning cold in Bamenda.
“My worry is my children,” she says. “They must go to school. I did not go to school.”
She pays 2,500 francs ($5) yearly for each child’s tuition. Uniforms, books, shoes and equipment cost an additional 50,000 francs ($100) each year, she says.
Taah thanks God for the ability to support her children’s educations.
“When I look at my children, I thank God for giving me the power that I use in going to the market every day to sell plantains,” she says. “It is my children’s progress in education that makes me to know that business has been going on well.”
She earns a profit of 25,000 francs ($50) each week selling plantains and will soon send her first daughter to university. Friends have told her that she should expect to pay approximately 600,000 francs ($1,215) for her daughter’s first year, which covers rent, tuition and groceries, she says.
Nchang says that her mother’s tireless work as a bayam-selam enabled her to attend university in Yaoundé. Her father died when she was 3, and her mother provided for seven children by selling cocoyams, a type of food plant.
“I grew up knowing my mother to be a bayam-selam,” she says. “She has never known sound sleep in her entire life. She gets up early and comes home late every day.”
Her mother gave her the best life she could ever imagine, Nchang says proudly, adding jokingly that her mother should be eligible for a Guinness World Record for the many years that she forwent sleep to raise her children.
A graduate of the teachers college, which trains students to teach in Cameroon’s government-run schools, Nchang now awaits a job posting from the Ministry of Secondary Education. She hopes to repay her mother someday.
“When I start working and earning a salary, I will make sure I give my mum a promotion,” she says. “I will grant her retirement – she is overdue – and let her sit at home and enjoy the fruits of her hard labor.”
Bayam-selams endure sleepless nights to support their families, and society should respect them for that commitment, Fomuso says.
But in some ways, their businesses invite disdain, she says. For example, most women display their goods on the ground or wear dirty clothing to the market.
The Association des Bayam-Selam du Cameroun helps these women to improve their reputations, she says. The association educates women on the importance of hygiene and teaches them to place their goods on clean surfaces. The association also counsels bayam-selams on the value of appearance and neatness.
Female bayam-selams also acquire education on business strategy from the association, learning to computerize their sales records and form small-scale associations with one another.
Magha, Bih and Taah all belong to the Association des Bayam-Selam du Cameroun and take advantage of the educational opportunities it offers.
Society will respect these women if they follow these strategies, Fomuso says. But customers must also understand that bayam-selams sometimes appear rude because of the way people treat them.
“Anybody in any vocation or profession, when pushed to the wall, will act the way bayam-selam women act,” Fomuso says. “People complain that they are rude, yes. It is because most often, people are rude to them.”
