In A French Village, People Cry For A Donald Trump— “Lord Jesus, give my children and me something to eat today. Amen!” This is how my mother often ended her morning prayer.

I heard almost the same words with a few slight nuances from Auntie Blandine, Auntie Anata and even Auntie Philomène.

If you went outside and walked around my neighborhood of Fanta Citron in Mvog-Ada in Yaoundé, Cameroon, at that early hour, you would hear almost the same prayer in all the houses.

In the evening, most often the prayer was devoted to thanks to the Lord for having lived another day and to the hope that his son, Jesus Christ, would come to change our lives and move us up in the socio-economic ladder. This hope was palpable everywhere. At the local market, you could hear women bursting out in dialect if anything unusual was a sign that Jesus Christ was going to appear in our lives. At songo’o, the transitional game that men played back then, when one of the players scored successive victories, he wondered whether it was not due to divine intervention. In our improvised football stadiums, we children were looking for signs from above.

We all hoped for the arrival of a messenger of God, a messiah who would come and put an end to our misery. For most of us, only divine intervention was capable of getting us out of the poverty in which we were plunged. We were convinced of this. We repeated it to each other, from children to adults, so that sometimes, when someone indicated that they were going to try to join the army or the police, for example, it was often initially greeted with mockery. When one of us tried to dream of a better life through individual merit and effort, it was greeted with total indifference. There was no encouragement because for many, there was a social determinism that could only be broken by the hand of God. This said a lot about our despair and hopelessness.

There was an equivalent despair that I detected during my stay in a small French village around Christmas. I had never seen so much lack of hope among some of my countrymen and countrywomen.

— “We need a dictator,” Bruno Baudouin, a 75-old White man, said. “We need someone with balls. We need a strong man.”

— “Are you ready to sacrifice some of your freedoms?’ I asked him.

— “Yes,” he responded. “I won’t be able to do certain things anymore, I know. I know I’m going to suffer but we need it.”

Seeing my dazed expression, Bruno added.

— “Nothing is going well in this country anymore. We have fallen to the bottom. There is no more respect. We need discipline.”

I remained quiet, listening to him.

— “Sorry if I offended you, but that’s what I think,” he continued. “I speak my mind. Sorry, if you don’t like it, but it’s me. It’s who I am. I am fed up of being silenced.”

On this Christmas Day, the discussion quickly turned to politics in this large house lost in the countryside. We were in the small village of Saint-Martin-en-Bresse, in Burgundy, a region of great wines and gastronomy, four hours by car from Paris, heading south-east. It was “apero time”, a French tradition of having drinks and snacks before a meal.