Ethnic Group Controls Majority of African Nation’s Commerce : Sky Is the Limit for Cameroon’s Hard-Driving Bamileke Businessmen

Irene Pessonka has big plans for her future. The 17-year-old cigarette vendor looked up at the 10- and 15-story buildings of Cameroon’s main port and said, “I want to get into real estate.”

Her dreams of success are not uncommon among her ethnic group, the Bamilekes of Western Cameroon. Most of those tall buildings belong to Bamileke businessmen, who have built up small empires from a street-vending business like Pessonka’s, hawking roasted peanuts or selling clothing on the sidewalk.

Pessonka scraped together about $50 to buy several dozen cartons of cigarettes, matches, chewing gum and candies, which she sells from dawn to dusk out of a wooden box on a busy downtown street. She makes it clear that she will be selling cigarettes only until she saves enough money to open a larger business. She eventually wants to own a clothing store.

“I want to accomplish something before I get old, while I still have the energy,” she said, her eyes flashing, in between trading barbs with flirtatious customers and a cigarette company promoter who wants her to carry his brand.

Dream Came True

Around the corner from Pessonka’s stand, in a dingy office over a supermarket, is a man who has lived out her dream. He is Joseph Kadji Defosso, a Bamileke businessman who started as a street vendor and now owns a supermarket chain, a brewery, several luxury hotels, numerous rental properties and myriad other business interests.

A compact elderly man who speaks rough French--he never had time to finish school--Kadji stares out from behind a pair of spectacles with a fierce gaze similar to Pessonka’s.

Kadji has little time to waste. He has made his fortune by knowing whom to offer what and when. “Some people know how to work, some don’t,” he said.

Unlike many African countries where foreigners--Lebanese, Pakistanis, Indians, French and others--dominate the commercial sector, Cameroon has an aggressive indigenous ethnic group, the Bamilekes, who control the majority of commerce.

Prospered Despite Competition

Despite competition from Hausa traders, who for centuries have controlled major trading routes and commerce in the north, the Bamilekes have spread from their mountainous region in the west to ply their trade throughout the country of 10 million.

In addition to owning hotels, bakeries, clothing stores, breweries and other large businesses in major cities, small communities of Bamilekes run grocery stores and other small businesses in almost every town.

It has only been in the last 26 years, since independence in 1960, that the Bamilekes have assumed such a dominant position in the commercial sector.

The Bamilekes were traditionally looked down upon by other ethnic groups, who used them as field laborers and house servants. Many were recruited for forced labor during colonial times to build the port of Douala and the country’s railroads.

Fought Ex-President

During the early years of independence, the Bamilekes were deeply involved in various political groups fighting guerrilla wars against the former government of President Ahmadou Ahidjo. Many were imprisoned, killed or driven into exile. The group’s region received little aid from the government.

As a result, the Bamilekes had to depend on themselves and their traditional tribal structure to survive.

“The Bamilekes have always been hard workers,” said Simo Hippolyte, a Bamileke who is assistant manager of a Doula hotel run by one of his clansmen. “Each chief had a government, and people were expected to organize themselves and work hard to pay their taxes to him.”

However in the modern-day money society, this banding together to pay the chief his due has become a form of lending society known as a tontine.

Couldn’t Get Loans

“The banks wouldn’t give us loans to start businesses, so we started the tontines,” Hippolyte said.

A tontine is a group of people who get together weekly or monthly to pool a sum of money. The pot is auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will be given a limited time to pay back the loan. Other tribes are setting up similar groups, called njangis .

In addition to bidding for the money, participants must explain their plans, whether it’s opening a shop, paying customs duties on a shipment of goods or starting a commercial venture.

The advantage to small entrepreneurs is immediate access to large sums of money. But interest rates in the tontines can run as high as 100%, and there is strong communal pressure to ensure that the money is repaid on time.

‘No Cadavers’

“We say, ‘There are no cadavers in a tontine,’ ” Hippolyte said. “If your father dies, you pay the tontine back first before worrying about the cost of a funeral.”

However, he noted, the tontine participants often will help members pay for funerals, weddings or such things and will hold Cameroonian-style house-raising parties to construct a store or an apartment building of a paying member.

The Bamilekes point out that the entrepreneurial spirit springs from traditional tribal values, which stress individual responsibility.