Reading Habits and Book Supplies in Cameroon

CHINUA ACHEBE wrote once from the Nigerian situation that local reading was entirely for profit, exam‐passing, promotion, and never for pleasure. Almost the same comment is appropriate for Cameroon. I have dealings with students at primary and secondary and university levels, and with teachers and civil servants, religious, businessmen, military personnel. I give advice about courses of study and textbooks. I lend books and order books from England for interested parties. I have only once in five years found a Cameroonian reading for apparent relaxation or pleasure: a provincial Divisional Officer, caught in his residence with a copy of Churchill's memoirs. Could that have been ‘business’ reading? The only other Cameroonian I know who regularly reads Churchill, and Macmillan, does so for political and stylistic reasons, which are for ultimate profit, overtly admitted, rather than for sheer interest and fun.