Ngolobolo: Broken Village, Broken People

With a bag of cocoa balanced on her back by a strap round her forehead, a female farmer picks one step at a time across the precarious hanging bridge constructed with canes. She is coming back from the farm and has to cross the surging River Mungo by the only means available, “Amog bright” or a hammock bridge, in straight English.

By Njumbe Peter Salle*

Using the Amog bright is risky business as the cane bridge wears out and can easily detach, hurling its users into the river. To add more danger and inconvenience offered by the Amog bright, the River Mungo sometimes overflows its banks and stops any movement across the hanging bridge. When this happens, food and cash crops get stuck in the farms and eventually get bad.

One of the largest producers of cocoa and other crops like plantains, coco yams, cassava and vegetables in Konye Subdivision, Meme Division, Southwest Region, Ngolobolo is probably the poorest village of its size in the subdivision and a distillation of Cameroon’s rural woes.

Several years on, Ngolobolo farmers are still sadly crippled by the manacles of poor road network or the lack of roads and the chains of poverty. They still live on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast forest of material prosperity.

In order to improve on agricultural value chain and increase food security in the country, crops produced by farmers should be able to reach the market at the right time and in good condition. This will make distribution and commercialization easier. That is why there is an urgent need for the construction of a permanent bridge across the River Mungo to link farms in Ngolobolo village to external markets.

The bridge will not only ease the evacuation of farm produce, but will also link up neighboring Kupe-Muanenguba

Division. Presently, people risk the ‘Amog bright’ to get to Tombel and Bangem in Kupe-Muanenguba.

*ERuDeF Coordinator of Agroforestry for Southwest Region