It was always our last line of defense, or rather our final blow when we felt defeat looming.
“Anyway, you’re going to have to leave,” I or one of my male cousins would say to our sisters and female cousins.
“No, we’re not going anywhere,” one of them would answer vehemently.
“Yes, you will be kicked out. This neighborhood is ours” one of us would repeat, feeling that the first attack had hurt, and we thus kept fighting to reverse the situation.
“We will make sure you are out of here,” one of us would then add.
There were a few more protests from our sisters and cousins but we could no longer hear them. We were already gone, celebrating our victory to whoever would listen.
The verbal confrontation between girls and boys usually ended like this in my extended and large family during my childhood. The scenario often repeated itself: our sisters and cousins always had the advantage because they were good with words. But we boys did not hesitate to use the only weapon we thought would hurt them: marriage.
Marriage in our traditions generally meant that the woman would follow her husband. This was also reflected in inheritance rights. Men were the main heirs. There was therefore a tendency to push girls to find a husband as soon as possible. Not only did it bring a little wealth to the family via the dowry — in our country it is the men who pay the dowry — but it was also an honor for a family to marry its daughters, because having a daughter getting married was a sign that the gods were watching over the family. In my generation, none of my sisters or cousins had been married, despite the fact that four of them were old enough to do so, when I was seven years old. It had become the talk of the neighborhood, much to the dismay of my mother and my aunts. It had also become the subject of mockery at soccer games in Fanta Citron, the poor neighborhood of Mvog-Ada, Yaoundé in Cameroon where I grew up. Our friends and neighbors would take digs at us seeing it as a sign, according to them, that our family was cursed.
“Don’t touch me. You’ll give me your bad luck,” had become the joke my cousins and I got in the neighborhood.
To say that my mother and aunts were working to end “our curse” was an understatement. They were determined to marry off Medounga, the only child of auntie Ebogo and the first grandchild of my maternal grandparents. Medounga must have been nineteen years old at the time.
One Sunday, when my cousin Ayi and I were returning home after the 11 AM mass service where we were both altar boys assisting the officiating priest, we found Medounga sitting on the ground halfway between the house and the church, which was a half hour walk from our shantytown. We assumed she was waiting for her boyfriend who lived nearby. But she was pensive and had tears flowing. She looked at us and told us to move on.
When we arrived home, my mother and auntie Blandine, who were finishing getting everything ready for their tontine, were whispering, as if to avoid being heard by unwanted ears.
“Sister, I don’t understand what’s gotten into her,” my mother said.
“She thinks she’ll find a match that good?” retorted auntie Blandine.
“Her little guy, what does he bring to the table?" my mother asked. "Nothing. She is lucky. Lundi wants to change her life and lift our curse.”
“Sister, today’s youth have completely lost their minds. There is no comparison between that guy, a little messed up guy, and Lundi.”
“Ebogo can’t stop crying,” my mother said of their older sister who was Medounga’s mother. “How can she do this to her, after all she has done for her.”
“Sister, we have to stop all this nonsense. She’s going to marry Lundi and that’s it,” auntie Blandine said.
Just a few weeks after this conversation that my cousin Ayi and I had overheard, Lundi, the husband-to-be who was in his forties, showed up one evening with members of his family to ask for “the list,” a range of what the future bride’s family asked for as a dowry. The evening was punctuated by louder than usual ululations because my mother and aunts wanted to let everyone know that the curse had chosen another house from now on. Their family was once again acceptable.
While her mother and the rest of the family were celebrating, cousin Medounga looked sinister. She was physically present but totally absent. She was going to perform her duty because she had been told many times that she was ungrateful. She was asked to listen to reason, to common sense, but no one ever asked whether common sense did not require that the marriage should also be beneficial for her.
It was the image of my cousin Medounga that came to mind as I met with many Black men in Atlanta, GA, less than a month before Election Day, as I toured key states with a large Black population to capture the voices of Black male voters in this consequential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. In such a divided country, there is no doubt that a handful of states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the swing states — will crown the 47th President of the United States.
Luc Olinga
For several months now, Harris and Trump have each been trying to maintain the coalition of their respective parties from 2020 and to eat into each other’s camp. For Trump, this amounts to reducing the percentage of Black men who intend to vote for Harris. The strategy seems to be working, according to the polls which show that while a large majority of Black men, a traditional voting bloc for Democrats, say they support Harris, it is smaller compared to Joe Biden in 2020. At the time, the election was very close between Biden and Trump.
But the more polls come and go and show a slight erosion of Black men’s support for Harris and the Democratic party in general, the more attention has been paid to them. The pressure is high. In this month of October in Atlanta, the Black Mecca in the United States, the owners of barbershops, which remain one of the few places where men socialize in the Black community, no longer want to be candid. I tried to query more than ten of them. Initially, they agreed but canceled at the last minute. Many referred me to the fate of one of them at the end of June.
Last June, Ricky Jones, the Black owner of Rocky’s Barbershop in Atlanta, told the media that he had lost many customers after hosting a Trump campaign event intended for Black small businesses. The event was called the Black American Business Leader Barbershop Roundtable. Trump surprised the attendees by phoning in during the event.
One barber, however, kept his word, but after an hour in the barbershop, I realized that he and two of his co-workers had agreed to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear: that they supported Kamala Harris and were excited about voting a Black woman into the most powerful office on the planet. I tried, unsuccessfully, to break through that wall of we-give-you-whatever. I gave up.
I decided to try something else: just go to a barbershop to get a haircut and chat with the barber. On October 10, I went to a barbershop on North Ave NE, between Midtown and the historic Old Fourth Ward neighborhood.
“Man, what do you think of Kamala Harris?” I asked my barber, just a few minutes after I sat on the chair.
He remained silent. His big belly pressed my right arm so hard that I thought it was his way of asking me to stay quiet. He was focused. I learned a little later that his name was Byron.
“Man, she’s not going to do anything,” he told me. “Nothing’s going to change even if she wins.”
Then silence. He jumped in the middle of a conversation between the barber on his right. I learned later that it was his brother and the owner of the barbershop.
“Will you vote for her," I asked in an effort to probe further. "The polls show that there are more and more Black men who support Trump.”
“If Trump got elected it may be worse for Black people in this country. If she gets elected, we may probably be like damn, we might have dodged a bullet,” Byron responded.
He added: “I don’t think that more or less a lot of people want her to be the president, they just don’t want Trump to be the president, you know what I am saying,” Byron said. “I don’t think people are like, so in love with her. I just really think that a lot of people are afraid for Trump to be president, you know what I am saying; so, a lot of people are supporting her just because of that.”
Byron is the epitome of the Black man the polls have been describing, and no different than many of the bros I had talked to in recent months about the presidential election. He had this look of, okay, but what does that mean for me? My daily life will be the same the day after November 5, he seemed to be saying.
It was almost 7 PM local time when he started cutting my hair. Rap and R&B music were blasting in the shop. According to the opening hours, the shop closed at 6 PM. But it was rush hour. Everything here indicated that most of the barbers — there were nine stations in all — were going to work for several more hours. There were two living room sets in the middle of the room. They were all occupied by customers, waiting for their turn. A little boy, who seemed to be the son of one of the barbers, cried loudly from time to time, to remind his father that he was fed up. His grimaces and actions triggered laughs from everyone.
When others talk about the symbolism of voting for the first female president, the first Black and Asian woman president, my barber and his brother preferred to contrast it with what the Obama presidency did to them.
“We had a Black man in the White house. [Barack] Obama. He really didn’t change things for Black people,” the brother and owner chimed in. “The president is just the face, man. I’m going to be honest with you. I really don’t think she is going to change too much. She is going to keep a couple of things in place, like affordable healthcare. Obama put that in place but Trump is trying to take that out; she is going to keep that in place but I don’t think she is going to change things for Black people, bro. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Byron agreed.
“This is a White man’s country, man. It’s about money, bro. White people get all the money and everything. The president is just the face.”
My barber and his brother that day reminded me of my cousin Medounga. Voting for Harris is a marriage of convenience for them, as it was marrying Lundi for my cousin. Like her, their hearts are not in it.
“If there was another good option, I think that people would go for the other option,” Byron said, seemingly to dismiss Harris’ proposals directed to small businesses and Black men in particular, like affordable housing, financial aid for small businesses, and healthcare.
I asked if he had seen former President Barack Obama’s remarks made earlier that day, scolding Black men about their reluctance and lack of energy towards Harris.
His brother stepped in. He was unhappy, almost angry at Obama.
“Man, why are you lecturing me? Stop, man,” he said. “When he was President, he didn’t do much for us, for Black people. You know what I mean?”
“He was alone, bro," said Byron, trying to defend the former president, by referring to the fact that during his two terms Obama, a Democratic president, faced a Republican House of Representatives, with the exception of his first two years in office, determined to block his agenda. "He was against White men. This country is for White men.”
“When he was president, Black men were still being arrested for no reason," said the brother pushing back. "Police locked up your ass for no reason.”
A couple of hours earlier, Obama, during a stop in Pittsburgh, PA., where he was campaigning for Harris, said: “we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running.”
He then implied that the lack of enthusiasm may have something to do with Harris’ gender.
“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses; I’ve got a problem with that,” Obama said that day. “Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
I asked Byron whether former President Obama had a point when he talked about misogyny as a possible explanation for the lack of energy among Black male voters for Harris.
“Man, we will look weak with her," Byron answered. "Other countries will laugh at us.”
A moment of silence.
He seemed to be struggling with his own prejudices and stereotypes.
“Man, she’s the lesser of two evils," he told me. "She’s not going to take away rights and things that already exist. Trump wants to take away rights, man.”
My barber and his brother are registered voters but it is not certain that they will vote on November 5.
“Atlanta is Black," Byron said. "She will win here, man.”
“How about the margins?”
He asked me to stop moving. And basically, to shut up. My time was up.
Listening to him and his brother, I saw my cousin Medounga’s predicament. Byron, if it were up to him, would not vote for Harris. But he probably would if he goes to the polling station on November 5. How to get him to the polling station is the challenge Harris and her campaign face. And it is not, as his brother’s reaction to Obama’s admonishing of Black male voters showed, by lecturing him or guilting him.
Byron and his brother, like other Black men, seem to be well aware of what is at stake. They just need to make peace with the choice they think they must make.
Until Election Day, they seem to want to hear one thing from Vice President Harris and her surrogates and supporters: “we are listening.”
No more lectures. No promises.
They seem to live now by the adage that promises are only binding on those who believe them. They have heard and believed promises for decades, only to end up being disappointed, they say.
“I hear you,” from Harris would suffice this time.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.