Sickle cell children have always been stigmatized. Some said I was the sort of child that brought bad luck, and they asked my mother to leave me in a field so that I could die.

In the population in general, not only in Cameroon, but in sub-Saharan Africa, where sickle cell is prevalent, they don’t understand what it is in reality.

They stigmatize people with sickle cell. At school, the teacher never asked me questions, never asked me to the front. That’s stigmatization. The teacher made me sit at the back of the class, because he does not want you to sit in front because he is worried that I will touch his child and what will happen to him.