The Black Man and his Visa

written by Jean Tardif Lonkog

Tardif is the son of a medical practitioner, an herbalist and a spiritual healer in northwestern Cameroun. When his father eventually gives up his practice, his mother struggles to put him and four of his sisters through high school. But financing university is a challenge. Tardif works for seven years in the farms and as a school teacher and seeks help from all quarters of the globe to try to raise money for university in his home country. Then one day he finds himself in China – studying Chinese medicine – and hoping for a better life than the one he had in Cameroon. The predicaments are as challenging as they are profoundly instructive. Tardif poses as a Dutchman and as an American to get jobs teaching English and survive in his host country. He ends up earning the respect of his students and employers, but not without everyday encounters with precarity. Just as one problem is resolved, another always seems to be brewing on the horizon. Tardif autobiographically opens his adventures, his transformations and his musings on Chinese and African ways of thinking and living to those interested in intercultural mobility and learning about life. His story reads like a dairy and keeps one wondering what will happen next.

Jean Tardif Lonkog

Jean Tardif Lonkog was born in Santa, in the North West Region of Cameroon. He went to high school not far from home, at the Cameroon School of Arts, Science and Technology in Bambili, where he read the arts and graduated in 1993. In 2001-02, he attended the Mbengwi government teacher training college, and then taught locally in schools from 2002 to 2004. He travelled to China in 2005 where he taught English and learnt traditional Chinese medicine until 2008 when he returned to Cameroon. He is now a schoolteacher in the north of Cameroon. He also practices traditional Chinese medicine. He is studying for a bachelor’s degree in sociology via distance learning. He is married and a father of one. The Black Man and his Visa is his first book, and he hopes to keep writing.