A few months into the pandemic, a friend from Cameroon, where I’m from, sent me a video of a news clip. The video starts with shaky footage of a small crowd of people yelling and running out of a drab building onto a city street. They’re carrying what appears to be a human body.
A voiceover in French explains that the body, wrapped in white cloth and carried on a green mattress, belongs to a man in his 70s named Nyamsi Maurice, who died after several days in the hospital. The scene takes place in front of the Clinic Marie O, a medical facility located in the neighborhood of Bali in Douala, the largest city in Cameroon.