Ways of being poor -Life at a water tap in Urban Africa

By Trond Waage

United Nations has decided that the fight against urban poverty in third world countries shall be given the highest priority. Nobody will disagree on the importance of this aim. But what kind of social consequences does it take to be poor in urban Africa?
There exists very limited qualitative research on this topic.


Since 1995 I’ve been coming back to Tongo Pastoral, a Muslim quarter in Ngaoundéré. Several of the youths described in my text and films in my Ph.D work and live in this quarter.
(“Chez nous on se débrouille. Om å håndtere uforutsigbarhet. Fortellinger om syv ungdommiljøer i den polyetniske byen Ngaoundéré i Nord-Kamerun 2003).
What I’ve seen is somewhat paradoxically that the poorest of the young men living here, those who are refugees from the neighbouring country, The Central African Republic, seems to be more successful when it comes to realize their goals in life, than many of their native age mates. Most individual in both of these groups live for less than a dollar a day, but even though that the refugees are the poorest, they have their own place to live and some of them are married and have kids. They do not have their family here, so they have to manage. In my Ph.D work I have described this kind of quarter-life in detail, emphasising on the different groups’ social adaptation in their everyday life.

Now have I started up a project to make a documentary film on the enormous flexibility in the refugees’ way of life. They live by selling and transporting water, they work as “boys” (servants), housekeepers, bricklayers, diggers and being present in the streets they are taking care of the kids from the quarter. For the local Muslims population, the
work the refugees do, is associated with slavery. For the refugees it represents new possibilities, escaping to work on their parents’ small plantations. These boys willingly take these kinds of jobs, and make the possibility for the former elite to keep up with their bourgeois way of life.

Somehow paradoxically these boys, who represent some of the thousands and thousands of young kids who come to towns like Ngaoundéré, contribute to social and symbolic stabilization in urban society that live under strong cultural pressure and very difficult economic situation. This film project is about the enormous variation in poor people’s way of life, and their contribution to cultural stabilization.

This is an interesting topic for a film, and it would contribute to the understanding of “being” poor and survival strategies in such milieus.