Asylum Seeker From Cameroon Lost His World but Gained a New Home

December 7, 2008
The Years of Living Nervously

Josh Haner/The New York Times
“For me, Times Square represents a new beginning,” said Njoya Hilary Tikum, who often visited the area during his months of idleness.

By EMILY BRADY


WHEN the flight from Heathrow landed at Kennedy Airport, the cabin quickly filled with the sounds of seat belts being unfastened, cellphones beeping and passengers grabbing their overhead luggage.

Taking a deep breath, Njoya Hilary Tikum joined the crush of people waiting to exit. Mr. Tikum, who was 26 and had a compact build and a broad, handsome face, normally exuded an unflappable calm. But on this warm summer evening he was visibly nervous.

It was July 12, 2006. The previous day, Mr. Tikum had left his native Cameroon, a West African nation of 18 million people, carrying only his passport, an American visa, a small wad of money and a bag containing a towel, soap, flip-flops and a change of pants.

Maybe it was his unusually light load or the anxious way he scanned the passport control area. Whatever the reason, immigration officials pulled Mr. Tikum aside and began questioning him.

“Are you running away from something?” he was asked.

“No,” he replied.

The answer could not have been further from the truth. Mr. Tikum, who hoped to be granted political asylum in the United States, was by his own account running from many things: a Cameroonian jail, torture by his nation’s police, his work in the Anglophone secessionist movement, the death of his father and the arrests of his mother and sister. He had, in fact, just fled his country for the third time.

But Mr. Tikum feared that if he revealed all this, he would be sent directly to an immigration detention center. Terrified of being locked up yet again, he told the officials that he was on his way to visit Cameroonian friends who lived in Maryland. That was true, except for the fact that the friends had no idea he was coming.

Eventually, the officials pressed an entry stamp into Mr. Tikum’s passport. He was free to go.

What Mr. Tikum did not know at the time, however, was that his quest for asylum would involve a new, nearly two-year ordeal, one defined not by prisons and flight but by waiting and uncertainty, anxiety and idleness. If the old ordeal had been hell, the new one was limbo, a limbo shadowed by the fear that he would be deported back to the perilous world he had escaped.

“It was like I was stranded at high sea,” Mr. Tikum said, “unable to move forward or backward.”

Broken Glass

Cameroon is a nation defined by the way people speak. Both French and English are official languages: Two provinces are mainly Anglophone and eight are Francophone. But sometimes the two groups coexist tensely.

On Oct. 1, 1998, Mr. Tikum, then 18, and other students planned a march to observe the 37th anniversary of the independence of Cameroon’s English-speaking provinces from Britain. But before they could parade, the students were surrounded by the military police and arrested.

Upon being released from jail two days later, Mr. Tikum began in earnest to seek rights for English speakers equal to those of the nation’s French speakers. He wanted student testing to be conducted in English, for instance, and as many English resources as French ones in his university’s library.

Soon Mr. Tikum began focusing not on language parity for Cameroon’s English speakers but on their secession from French-speaking Cameroon. His subsequent political activities led to several arrests, among them a 10-day imprisonment in June 2002. During that time, he claimed, the police hit him with their guns, made him dance on broken glass and dripped hot candle wax on his legs and genitals.

When Mr. Tikum lifts the legs of his pants, he reveals shins scarred with translucent circles that he says were made by molten wax. Curling around his left ankle is a dark, snakelike scar; that mark, he says, was left by a rope.

Mr. Tikum’s claims seem generally plausible; the State Department, along with groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, report that security forces in Cameroon are known to strip, beat and torture prisoners. Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, where Mr. Tikum subsequently received counseling, said Cameroonian clients reported what he called “some of the most sadistic forms of abuse that I have heard.” Another Bellevue doctor said Mr. Tikum’s scars were consistent with the tortures he described.

Tortured or not, Mr. Tikum did not cease his political activities. Starting in 2003, he said, he helped a secessionist leader escape from jail and fled with him to Nigeria. His own father, a police officer, was stabbed to death in reprisal for his son’s activities, Mr. Tikum believes. He sneaked back to Cameroon to his father’s funeral, only to be rearrested. He then fled to Europe but returned in June 2006, eager to see his family.

When his mother and sister were arrested shortly after that visit, Mr. Tikum knew it was time to flee again, perhaps for good. His choice of destination was simple: The only visa he had left from his travels was one that would let him come to America.

Plywood Walls

After Mr. Tikum’s encounter with the immigration officials at the airport that July night in 2006, he headed out of the arrival area. Unsure where to go and with only Central African francs in his pocket, he wandered around the airport for hours. Finally, in the early morning, he met a baggage handler from Senegal who exchanged his francs for dollars and paid for a taxi to take Mr. Tikum to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

From there, Mr. Tikum took a bus to the town in Maryland where his Cameroonian friends lived. A month later, he headed back to New York.

At first, home was a twin mattress on the kitchen floor of a studio apartment in Maspeth, Queens. The apartment, which belonged to a friend of a friend, was a humble refuge, but the tiny space, cordoned off with pieces of plywood, served as a sanctuary. Nevertheless, in the dark of night, he was a haunted man. Often he dreamed that he was being chased and beaten, and that his mother was dead.

A few weeks later, on a day in September, Mr. Tikum walked to the local post office and slipped his application for asylum into a mailbox. With that act, he joined 43,000 others who requested asylum that year in the United States, a year in which about 26,000 received it. The decision process often takes months, even years. And while some people, like Mr. Tikum, are allowed their freedom during that time, others are held in prisonlike detention centers.

A particularly harsh requirement is that asylum seekers cannot work for at least five months after applying for protection. During this interval, Mr. Tikum was supported by various friends and relatives, among them fellow Cameroonian secessionists and a cousin in Chicago. One friend covered his $300 monthly rent; others sent him phone cards and small amounts of cash. Mr. Tikum often ate only one meal a day; sometimes he bought a roast chicken and tried to make it last a week. Unaware of food pantries and soup kitchens, he grew skinny and “pale,” as he described his appearance.

If making ends meet was hard, filling the empty hours was hard in a different way. But Mr. Tikum is a man with much curiosity about the world, and he used his free time to explore the vast city in which he had found himself.

“If I had a MetroCard,” he said over lunch at Africa Kiné, a Senegalese restaurant in Harlem, during one of a series of conversations about his long ordeal, “there was nothing that was going to keep me at home.”

The Book of Job

The first time Mr. Tikum visited Times Square, he stood, frozen, for two hours at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, just taking in the lights and the swarming crowds. He had never been anywhere that felt so free. Passers-by conversed in Swahili, French and Japanese. A tourist took a picture of a police officer and the officer didn’t seem to care, a small act that would have been unthinkable in Cameroon.

“For me, Times Square represents a new beginning,” said Mr. Tikum, whose generally upbeat personality was suppressed but not vanquished during his ordeals. “I love it.” The only place he was reluctant to visit was Harlem, because he had heard it was dangerous. As he explained it, “I got carried away by things I heard and read.”

If a place described in the newspaper caught his attention — Central Park, Union Square, Grand Central Terminal — he circled the name and planned a visit. That is how Mr. Tikum found himself on Labor Day 2007 at the West Indian American Day Carnival Parade in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The drumming reminded him of home, but he was taken aback by the often revealing attire. “In Cameroon,” he said, “no one’s going to go around half-naked dancing in the streets.”

Mr. Tikum, who also plays soccer in his adopted city, made such journeys not just to stave off boredom but also to avoid painful memories of his homeland. “I was looking for a place to rest my soul,” he said. “It helped me forget.”

At night, Mr. Tikum found solace in a Bible that he kept under his pillow, particularly the Book of Job. “He lost his family; he lost his world; he lost his status in society, and just when he thought everything was lost, God gave him back those things double-fold,” Mr. Tikum said. “So I would read that story over and over and over again.”

During much of that autumn of 2006, Mr. Tikum’s application for asylum slowly made its way through the legal system, and in November, he was interviewed by an officer at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. If Mr. Tikum was lucky, his application could be approved after this single meeting.

“Where is Cameroon?” was the first question he remembers being asked. Then, before he knew it, the interview was over.

Mr. Tikum walked away with the sinking feeling that the session had gone poorly, and apparently, he was right. In December, he learned that his application had not been approved, and that his fate would be decided by an immigration judge. Though a setback, the decision gave Mr. Tikum a new mission.

“I decided I was going to fight hard and find someone to represent me,” he said. “It was my last chance.”

Banana Porridge

In his search for a lawyer, Mr. Tikum was lucky. Human Rights First, a national nonprofit group that provides free legal aid to asylum seekers, agreed to take his case. And in another stroke of luck, at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Mr. Tikum learned of a Francophone Cameroonian activist named Jean-Pierre Kamwa who also helps asylum seekers, and who proved to be a friend.

“J’ai tellement faim,” Mr. Tikum announced almost immediately when the two men first met at Penn Station. “I’m so hungry.”

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Kamwa replied. “You’ll eat.”

They proceeded to East Tremont in the Bronx, where Mr. Kamwa’s wife cooked a Cameroonian porridge of plantains, bananas and palm oil. After dinner, Mr. Kamwa handed Mr. Tikum a large bowl of the porridge wrapped in a paper bag to take home. He also slipped him $50.

“I lived it; I know what it is like,” said Mr. Kamwa, who was granted asylum in 2000. “When I came I was locked up in detention for five months, and I had no relatives to help me.”

Mr. Kamwa even took Mr. Tikum to the place he feared to go — Harlem — where he toured the Apollo Theater. There, Mr. Tikum placed his hands on the tree stump that thousands of Apollo performers have rubbed for good luck, among them Michael Jackson, a performer he has long admired.

“I got to touch the tree that he touched,” he said. “That was big.”

Thanks in part to the work of his lawyers, in December 2007, more than 14 months after he requested asylum, Mr. Tikum received permission to hold a job. Last January, he was hired as a paralegal at the African Services Committee, a nonprofit health and social services agency in Harlem. One gratifying aspect of the work is interviewing applicants for asylum much like him.

“I would make more somewhere else,” said Mr. Tikum, who hopes one day to attend law school. “But I’m assisting others and I’m healing myself, too.”

Part of this healing has involved letting go of the goal of independence for English-speaking Cameroon. Mr. Tikum now believes that regional autonomy, like the system in American states, is best for his country.

With his paychecks, Mr. Tikum sends money to his family and occasionally splurges on things like a pair of wingtips with a checkerboard design. He rented a two-bedroom apartment in Morrisania in the Bronx, where he has a Cameroonian roommate who is himself seeking asylum. There, the two men reminisce about home and sometimes cook ndolé, a stew of bitter leaves, nuts and fish or goat meat that is Cameroon’s national dish.

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Even then, Mr. Tikum’s ordeal was not over. On June 3, he journeyed to Federal District Court in Manhattan, to be joined by four witnesses — Cameroonian refugees and others — who had agreed to testify on his behalf.

In the end, no witnesses were called. After Mr. Tikum’s lawyers asked him a few questions, the government lawyer asked why he hadn’t sought asylum in Europe. He replied that he had always intended to return home. The lawyer asked if he ever threw stones during the demonstrations. He said he hadn’t.

With that, the judge granted Mr. Tikum asylum.

Later that day, Mr. Tikum took three Cameroonian friends to the Statue of Liberty, and then up to Harlem for dinner at Africa Kiné. He topped off the evening by introducing his friends to the place that, for him at least, represents freedom and rebirth like nowhere else — Times Square — where the four men strolled up and down Seventh Avenue, retracing the route that Mr. Tikum had taken so many times before.

COURTESY OF: NYTIMES.COM