Douala, Cameroon – Mama Regina’s home sits wedged between the vast container port of Douala and the city’s sprawling slums. Cargo ships come and go. Trucks rumble past carrying timber, cocoa and oil towards the Atlantic. Inside her home, time barely moves.On the wall hangs a portrait of her son, Moses.“So handsome,” she whispers, almost to herself.His smile belongs to another life.Grief arrives in waves. Like the Atlantic beyond Douala’s port, it retreats just long enough to let her breathe before returning with the same relentless force. Whether beneath a grey sky swollen with rain that never comes or beneath the scorching Cameroonian sun, there is no shelter from it. Against the elements, and against time itself, she is powerless.For more than a year, she has waited.Not for her son. For his body.“He left this world the same way he entered it,” she says. “Suffering, without saying a word.”There is no anger in her voice any more. Only exhaustion.She recounts the phone call almost mechanically, as though repetition has stripped the words of everything except their weight. The call came from thousands of kilometres away, not from Cameroon, not even from Africa, but from Europe’s war.Her son was fighting alongside Russian forces when he came under Ukrainian fire. He was shot as he ran towards the trenches.As she speaks, silence fills the spaces between her sentences. I find myself imagining the unimaginable violence of his final moments. The …
