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BAMENDA.ORG was a collaboration between GAMA InfoTech in Cameroon and Ted Johnson in the USA.
By 1999 Roland had turned two simple assets—an e-mail address and a long-distance dial-up Internet connection—into a business: GAMA InfoTech, based in the city of Bamenda, Cameroon.
Most people in Bamenda hadn’t heard of the Internet yet, but Roland was already leveraging it, and making a living serving the small population of Bamenda who needed to send and receive e-mail.
It wasn’t even a cybercafé. Customers would use Roland’s e-mail address as their own, and instruct their correspondents to put the recipient’s name in the subject line. All incoming messages were printed out for customers. There were only one or two computers. All outgoing messages were transcribed by, or dictated to Roland or one of his employees.
At the time, the government of Cameroon had largely ignored the potential of the Internet, and the existing telecommunications infrastructure was ill equipped for any kind of data communications (beyond faxing, if that counts).
Yet Roland persevered in spite of bad connections, power fluctuations, long distance charges, and eventually against bureaucratic resistance from the government telecom.
Ted Johnson was interested in facilitating communication with his contacts in and around Bamenda--small NGOs and personal friends from his days in the Peace Corps. He quickly realized that the most effective way to do that was by helping Roland. Ted and Roland formed an informal partnership called BAMENDA.ORG.
Ted had the easy part: establishing some basic Internet accounts for a domain, Web hosting, and e-mail hosting.
Roland had the more formidable challenges:
Bamenda has now caught up with GAMA InfoTech, and there are several providers of Internet services.
