The people of Cameroun were expecting to see the patriarch at the foot of the gangway, as has become his custom, shaking hands with the palace oligarchs. What they got instead was a hand. In politics, a hand is never a trivial sight. A hand in politics has four degrees: the hand that kills, the hand that cheats, the hand that blesses, and the hand that governs.

The hand that kills

In ancient Rome, the crowd would fall silent to watch only one thing: the hand of Caesar. Thumbs up, the gladiator lived; thumbs down, he died. On August 20th in Yaoundé, it was the opposite. The hand no longer decided the fate of the gladiator—it was the gladiator’s hand that had to prove to the empire that he was still alive. Camerounians saw Biya’s hand salute them. Proof that he had returned alive.

The hand that cheats

When legs no longer carry you, you cheat with your hand. In 1986, Diego Maradona, the Argentine, scored with his hand against England and called it the Hand of God. Everyone saw the trick, yet the referee validated the goal. On August 20th, everyone saw that there was only one hand. Yet state television, with its 200 agents filming the procession, validated the miracle.

The hand that blesses

In religious ritual, power emanates from the hand. The priest imposes hands, the pope blesses Urbi et orbi, the king is anointed. Once blessed, the hand becomes a relic. On August 20th, the ritual was reversed. A relic-hand emerged through a tinted window, like a reliquary paraded on feast days, so the faithful would still believe.

The hand that governs

And so we arrive at the final degree: the hand that signs. For 74 days—the duration of Biya’s brief stay in Switzerland—the state was said to continue functioning. Why? Because the hand was signing. Decrees, appointments, laws. The hand was there, even if the body was not. This is the oldest legal definition of power: the manus, the hand. In Latin, manus means power itself. There are no speeches, no body, no walk down the tarmac. There is only the signature and the salute. The hand that signs and the hand that salutes.

In Rome, the hand decided whether others would live or die. In the church, whether they were blessed. In Yaoundé, it mostly signals that whoever wields it remains in place. After forty-three years in power, Camerounians must now get used to being governed by a hand—for a time that may be shorter than long. Marie Roger Biloa, a Camerounian journalist, puts it bluntly: “Cameroun must prepare for the definitive disappearance of a president already absent in fact.”