Yaounde’s tough cop takes on crime - and his family

Daniel Nelson

Here’s a collector’s item: a police procedural set in Cameroon.

And it’s the setting of Untamable that makes it so watchable.

The scenario is conventional: hard-boiled policeman uses violence and threats to track down the murderer of a cop, while at home the sleuth is beset by a sea of family troubles.

The two strands of his life run alongside each other, occasionally crossing, but the effects of his tough love attitudes towards his children and relatives are more interesting — partly because detection in Cameroon as shown in this drama lacks modern techniques such as forensics (the crime scene is rapidly messed up) with the result that crime-solving depends a lot on bullying and luck (“No wonder we still use the good old whip,” he muses resignedly).

Police Commissioner Billong is a martinet, a stickler for the rules in his private and work lives, but his rules include roughing people up to make them talk and hanging them upside down until they do so.

He claims his methods get results against wayward citizens in Yaounde and against his fearful children (or at least, some of them), though after a screaming row about the way he treats one of his sons his feisty wife calls him Psycho and tells him It’s ok to control the kids, but love them first.

The plot rolls along at pace, despite frequent power cuts, corruption, apathetic bureaucrats and lack of resources. Billing walks tall through it all, the very definition of a heroic, flawed man, and the main characters come across as real human beings, making the best of picking a way through the complexities of everyday life in challenging circumstances.

Plaudits to director/actor Thomas Ngijol for painting such an entertainIng collision of middle=class respectability and thoughtless petty crime.