shopping

Since arriving in Cameroon I’ve been intrigued and puzzled by the extraordinary amount of small scale business attempts. There is someone offering something at every thinkable location. But where and how to find one specific product? With the need in mind of having to buy some materials for my own work at one point, I’ve been trying to discover a pattern in the seemingly chaotic offer on the streets and the markets, so I wouldn’t need to hop on the back of a Bend Skin motorcycle every time, in return for asking them where to find the next item on my shopping list.

So far, I’ve only managed to understand some of the visual patterns identifying the shops and their products. A table with parasol means call-box. A guy carrying a cubic meter of medicines in a huge transparent bulb, means mobile pharmacy. A guy with a shoe on his head, is a walking shoe shop. Easy. But I haven’t been able to understand the geographic logic yet. That is, I don’t understand the choice of location from a merchant point of perspective. I’ve doubts about the concept of running a semi 24/7 shop in the middle of nowhere, with a focus on only 3 core products. I’ve doubts too about the chances of success of being one in a row of 50 merchants selling exactly the same thing, on exactly the same scale, and with a similar way of presentation. Like on the road from Ndobo to Douala. Taking that road feels like driving through a gigantic long-stretched IKEA by car. One kilometer of beds. Two  kilometers of chairs. Although competition must be tough in those situations, I hardly see any shop trying to be more attractive than it’s neighbors in an experimental way. Shops stick to the fixed system of recognizable codes of presentation. On top of that, I’m surprised by the indifference towards potential customers. Pro-active selling is definitely not cool in Cameroon. This contributes highly to a pleasant shopping atmosphere, although sometimes it’s even making it difficult to buy a product.

Being within a range of 5 or 10 meter to a customer making a sudden decision to buy something seems to be the business approach of shops selling phone cards, bottled nuts -and- the mattress business. Piles of mattresses can be found everywhere throughout the city. They color up the street scene along highways, at fruit markets or in car-repair areas. Wherever one might suddenly realize to need a new mattress.

By far the most common shop type is the call-box. People owning a mobile phone with a cheap rate subscription, a parasol and a table can easily start up a business by letting other people call with their phone. But rumors go that the phenomenon is under attack. As a first step, the rates and the prices for mobile phones have been brought down dramatically, inviting people to buy their own phone instead of saving money by using the call-boxes, anonymously. It’s exactly this aspect of the boxes that the current government seems worried about, with the elections of 2011 ahead. It’s not a surprise to hear an item on the news yesterday announcing new regulations requiring every mobile phone subscriber to hand in a photo and become a registered user, a process which is organized as if it were a big party with loud music, queues and free tickets for various events. The official reason is theft prevention, but it’s more probable that the authorities have become alerted by seeing the impact of mobile phone communication during the recent post-election turmoil in Iran. An event that has carefully been left out of the news broadcasts here, to not show an example. The word revolution seems a taboo. That could explain why Che Guevara is painted on hairdressing shops just because of his cool hair-style, and mentioned by youth as a cool brand. When asked, none of them know who he was. But: Luis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabana, Che Guevara. Cool!

Sander