Wirdzerem G Barfee
Can a people think reflect and contemplate profoundly in a culture of noise? If to think, reflect and contemplate is to create and (re)solve, and if to create and (re)solve is to construct and produce, and to produce and construct is to develop; then can a people really develop sustainably in an ambience of deafening noise? Can a society really thrive purposefully in bedlam?
These series of logical interrogation seek to address the state of noise in urban Cameroon, a disease that has attained alarming, if not thunderous proportions.
Noise, pertinently comes from the Latinism “nausea” whose related semantics hints on its negativity. But there can be positive noise too, characterised by its definite and tolerable amplitude/pitch and duration.
In this gamut we can hear that celebratory noise during a football match, music concert, festivals, and parties meant to mark milestones and celebrate success. There is also the positive noise of encouragement and courage when all hands are on deck, on the tug, on the pull – when the collective in celebratory mode convene to resolve a problem. In fact, one can also tolerate the purgative noise of wailing in a situation of human and material loss.
However, in Cameroon, noise has become an ugly, resistant, scabrous scar on the urban landscape. It has become a symbol that translates and interprets the symptom and disease of lawless and chaotic societal governance.
Everywhere is bedlam. Every street corner, every street pavement. Our million beer parlours scoring Guinness record proximities after every meter, the blaring of bad music from deafening boom boxes, and in turn, the maddening competing noises fuse into an indefinable hum of sonic bombs that bombard our eardrums from dawn to dawn!
When we eventually defy the noise at night and sleep, we continue to hope that dawn will come with serenity, peace and quietness. No. we are mistaken. We are not awoken by the chirps of birds, and even the muezzin’s call is deafened by Pentecostals and revivalists as their unreasonably loud, amplified gospel rips our dawn into pieces with the fanatic and frenetic songs, shrills, shrieks of banging bands and cryptic tongues.
As the sun rises, the scorching heat is compounded with more noise, this time by publicity vans mounted with loudspeakers screaming their wares into our unwilling ears. Then, as the traffic thickens, testing the patience of motorists, there is more noise, as these frustrated motorists resort to honking interminably. We argue and talk in high-pitched voices without knowing why.
You will leave the streets and come home – and solace is still hard to find. You wish you had the license to hang your neighbours: when it is not expectedly the wards, it is surprisingly the parents turning the volume knobs to the max. Dare voice your concern, dare complain about your right to quiet and peace, and you would have invited more bedlam: a torrent of invectives, of quarrel and menace. Dare wonder to their hearing about nuisance as part of tort. You will be doing so at your own risk and peril. You will be renamed The Egoistic Lone-Ranger at your baptismal of insults.
In a country where citizens are still battling for fundamental rights, who will listen to a lost voice in this desert philosophising about luxuries such as public and private nuisance generated by this collective noise machine?. Are you going to engage on an an ecological argument? Good luck, then…for what do you mean by noise pollution in a country that is still grappling desperately with the elementals of the material pollution of its air, soil and waters?
But noise pollution is not as secondary, immaterial, or as indispensable as the above sarcastic and cynical interrogations may lead us to believe and conclude. We have insinuated the philosophical relationship between noise and underdevelopment. In that line of thought we try to situate that the correlation between generalised, permanent and unhealthy generation of noise is not conducive for intellectual and productive output. Profound reflection and contemplation are activities that prosper in a calm and tame ambience. Noise is hostile to sound, coherent and constructive thought.
We have suggested the sociological destabilizations where noise pollution can become a source of acrimonious, litigious and contentious (co)existence between members and components of a society.
In this sense, studies carried out in London and reported by Sri Carmichael writing in The Consumer Affairs Reporter (2009) indicated that in the city up to about 10.000 noise complaints were registered and 2.000 notices were served on neighbours who generated the nuisance. As for the whole UK it is reported that the “Freedom of Information Act (FOI) indicated that from April 2008 – 2009 council received 315,838 complaints about noise pollution from private residences. This resulted in environmental health officers across the UK serving 8,069 noise abatement notices”. These litigious cases indicate significantly how noise can be inimical for harmonious societal co-existance.
Politico-literarily we can speculate that there exist a metaphoric or symbolic connection between anarchic noise and bad governance. Why do we think so? Because unwanted noise as nuisance is interdicted in most laws, and as such unbridled, abusive and unrepressed noise and noise generators indicates a state of judicial inertia and an absence of the rule of law and proper governance.
Serious research about noise proves that its effects are sometimes as damaging and destabilizing to the ecosystem as other genres of pollution. This ecological hazard is where the dangers of noise are evidenced in humans and non-humans. Studies and experience has proved that excessive and unwanted noise can result, at least for humans, in stress and stress-related disorders, complicated pregnancies, geriatric malaise, sleep disorders; and also according to the 1980 World Health Organisation report, noise can cause auditory, hormonal, nervous, immunological defects amongst other temporary or permanent pathologies. .
Furthermore, studies have also shown that that when noise does not aid in rendering extinct species like birds in the urbanscape, it decimates some of them like the intriguing January 2011 phenomenon of falling birds in the USA which some have attributed to noise. And when the abhorrent noise does not kill, it deforms the natures of the resilient species. This has been revealed in the seminal research of the Dutch ornithologist Hans Slabberkorn who observed a deformative-assimilative differentiation of the songs of urban birds (the European blackbirds) as these tended to imitated human/machine generated urban sounds contrary to the natural sounds of their fellow rural species. This, he opined, had the potential to engender an evolutionary opposition between the species.
With these cases in point we better ascertain the unascertained hazards that the pervasive and intrusive noise could be causing to the Cameroonian urbanscape in the domains, both tangible and symbolic, mentioned above. It is a public menace and dangerous culture that must be tackled with requisite muscle.
Thankfully and salutarily the SDO of Mfoundi – to laud the Yaoundé case – rattled by an intolerably boisterous city, recently sloughed off the usual coat of administrative apathy to nuisance, gathered his guts and sealed 12 Pentecostal churches for ‘unbearable noise and disturbances to others’.
To prove that this was no atheistic crusade, more drinking spots – popular as some of them were – were sealed for the same reason. A right step in the right direction. At least were beginning to awaken to the relevant fact that nuisance laws and ordinances were not enacted and decreed to do aesthetic pleasure to linguistics. Fighting nauseating noise is no luxury. Maybe it will also save us from the embarrassment of meeting foreign ruffled, disdainful, contemning stares, all reacting to our unconscious shrill-pitched speech conditioned bytour local Lombard vocal response syndrome ( a lecturer friend of mine working out of Cameroon once told how embarrassed they were when they realised that their fellow foreign lecturers had to come to politely remind them to lower their voices when they lectured as their pitches were distracting the latters’ classes one whole hall away!).
So as we contemplate our noisiness, we must reflect on the virtues of metallic silence, for it is as prized as that auriferous metal.
Picture of Yaounde courtesy of http://yajazz.centerblog.net
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