hist.final.imagining a bilingual nation.COMPLETE€¦ · Web viewIn the first years of the 1960s, a series of states under the administration of France and Britain, called collectively

Imagining a Bilingual Nation:A Study of Cameroon’s Independence and Reunification

at its Fiftieth Anniversary

History 301 Sec. 06, 9112Dr. Patricia Cleary Graham T. Baden

History 301, Dr. Cleary Imagining a Bilingual Nation Graham T. Baden

See me wonders, njanga di chop mololo!

See me wonders, njanga di chop mololo!

See my wonders, the prawns ate the mololo fish!

See my wonders, the prawns ate the mololo fish!

-Traditional Cameroonian Children’s Song1

1


In the first years of the 1960s, a series of states under the administration of France and

Britain, called collectively the Cameroons, underwent a process of independence through the

United Nations Trustee System. Although the people of Cameroon belong to a vast grouping of

tribal ethnicities, sharing little but a common geography, the reunification process of the 1960s

brought multiple Cameroonian Trusteeships together into one federal nation. The impetus for

this checkered reunification— its troubles continuing even until today— has been pondered by

scholars of Western Africa for half a century.

Historians have offered theories for this reunification, referencing causes as disparate as

party politics and village gender roles; nevertheless, there is one prevailing spirit in all of these

theories. In their works written about the independence and reunification of the Cameroons,

historians seem to offer only answers to the questions of how and why Cameroon reunited, but

do not reveal, however, who the Cameroonian People are. The history of this period suggests

that, by the very naming of Cameroon, through the bordering of a nation and the nomination of

its people, the Cameroonian spirit, an invisible identity, was born.

Before the navies of Europe knew anything of Cameroon save its volcanic Mount

Cameroon, the Bantu-speaking tribes originating in the Western highlands were the first to form

organized settlements in the coastal region of the Wouri River as early as the 16th century.2 In

the 1800s, the Fulani, a nomadic tribe consisting of mostly herdsmen, expanded their territory

from the sub-Saharan regions of northern Africa and into Cameroon.3 The Fulani Invasion, as it

has sometimes been named, was at first peaceful, its herders even paying taxes to the non-Fulani

kingdoms for grazing rights. Then in the 19th century, Fula herdsmen embraced the culture of

Jihad. Under the leadership of Mohibo Adama, the Fulani tribes invaded from the northern

reaches of Cameroon to capture and sell slaves to the Portuguese and Dutch.4

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For much of the early history of the central African region, Cameroon and its equatorial

neighbors were all but ignored by Europe. Cameroon is located at the elbow of the West African

coast where the Equator meets the Atlantic Ocean. Due to the formidable physical obstacles

raised by its dense jungles, mangrove swamps, and the threat of malaria and dysentery, what

little wealth Cameroon and its neighbors had to offer through bananas and lumber did not spur

Europe's trade exploits.5 One thing Cameroon could boast was its lucrative slave trade in the

coastal kingdoms. This rich coastal trade system provided thousands of slaves to Brazil and the

Caribbean, and ultimately lead to the first European naming of Cameroon.6 In 1472, the Wouri

River, feeding into the port that would later become Douala, was affectionately dubbed “Rio dos

Camarões.” This, when translated literally from Portuguese, means River of Prawns.7 This

process of imperial European nomination, in no small way, decided the fate of the Cameroonian

people for the next five centuries. It is a process that Stephen Greenblat refers to in Marvelous

Possessions: The Wonder of the New World as a “christening.”8

Europe would not ignore Cameroon for long, however. In 1884 Gustav Nachtigal, the

German Empire’s counselor for West Africa, raised the German flag over Douala, drawing the

first official borders of Cameroon in an agreement through treaties between British, French, and

tribal Douala kingdoms.9 In European imperialist fashion, Germany named the colony Kamerun,

a German derivative of the previous European name for the region. In the following thirty years,

despite armed conflicts with the Kpe, Bulu, and Bafut tribes of the region, Germany established a

large-scale plantation and trade system, expanding the borders of the colony in the process.10 By

drawing cross-ethnic labor groups to work the plantation fields and the demarcation of the

borders of the colony, Germany provided for the first shared-identity of the Cameroonian people,

an identity that continued to evolve especially with the coming of the First World War.11

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During the Great War, Kamerun was invaded and controlled by the French and British.

The forces of German Kamerun ultimately surrendered at the fortress of Mora in 1916.12 Then,

after the war, in an agreement through the League of Nations Mandate system of 1919, the

British and French divided the colony of Kamerun between themselves. The two nations were

given legal administrative authority over Kamerun in a broad-sweeping, punitive action against

Germany in response to the atrocities of the war. What had been Kamerun now became three

separate states, their border lines drawn artificially and haphazardly, neither following

geographical lines nor traditional tribal territories.13

Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant called for the establishment of independent

states out of the land that had been the colonies of Germany.14 This Eurocentric vision of

independence was to be fostered by the Cameroons' protectorate sponsors. The Covenant states

with unmistakable prejudice that these colonies are "inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by

themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” and declares that “the tutelage

of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their

experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility.”15 The Eastern

portion of the previous colony fell under the sponsorship of France and was subsequently

renamed to suit the Francophones in charge. The territory, christened Cameroun, was henceforth

governed by the French West African Federation (AOF), a centralized and hierarchical system of

officials appointed by Charles DeGaul, the President of France himself.16 The British, who were

given charge over the Western portion of the colony, named the region an anglicized version of

Kamerun and further divided the territory so that it might be more easily governed as extensions

of the North and South Nigerian governments. These northern and southern states are referred to

collectively as the Cameroons.17 Again, by partitioning Cameroon, the powers of Europe

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christened Africa and its inhabitants with three additional names, extending the imperial reach of

Kipling's White Man's Burden.18

However, there are many problems with this system. Sadly, instead of how the mandate

was intended to work— to offer these newly released territories responsible, liberal tutors, and

bring them to future autonomy— the French and British overextended their powers in the

imperialist fashion of the nineteenth century, treating the territories much like the neighboring

colonies of Nigeria and Equatorial Africa. The French went so far as to recruit natives in

Cameroon for compulsory crop cultivation to aid in the war effort of the Free French.19

After the League of Nations was dissolved in 1946, the United Nations Trusteeship

Program was established to create a better system to replace the Mandate before it. The Charter

states, in more specific terms than the Covenant, that the territories would be governed for the

"freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.”20 The Charter maintained the French and

British as Cameroons' sponsors and these two nations would continue to govern the Cameroons

until their eventual independence of 1960 and reunification in 1961.

Pointedly, the British treated the Cameroons in many ways as an extension of Nigeria,

never giving the territories their proper attention. The existing leper colonies were all but

ignored. Medical services were brief, irregular, and provided only by Nigerian doctors from

across the border.21 In fact, there were no permanent hospitals established in Northern

Cameroons during the Mandate Period.22 While the UN Mandate gave the British charge of the

most usable land for agriculture, they adhered to a strict open-door policy of free competition

with foreign economic enterprises and relied on foreign influence to build the economy of the

Cameroons.23 Interestingly, after seven years of occupation when the British still could find no

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buyers for the properties that had been plantations, most were sold back to their previous German

owners.24 After World War II, when plantations became the official property of Nigeria, the

Cameroons Development Corporation sent nearly eighty percent of its profits to Nigeria as a

tax.25 By 1938, the British Cameroons maintained only 185 miles of road, a condition that the

UN Visiting Mission found “poor, inadequate, and unsatisfactory.”26 Langhee calls the Trustee

system “little more than a monitored colonialism” and argues that while the trust system is

generally considered to have been a better form of governance than that of straightforward

colonialism, in the case of the British Cameroons, that is not the case.27

In the first post-war decade, much of Africa and the colonial world began to groan under

the weight of foreign rule. Soon after Vietnam achieved independence from the French, the

colonies of Africa would one-by-one come to find their own independence. This period is often

referred to as the African Tide.28 In 1948 Ruben Um Nyobé, an anti-imperialist and hyper-

Cameroonian nationalist, founded the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC).29 It would

shortly become the Cameroonian branch of the RDA, an African political group with ties to the

French Communist Party. The RDA operated in the interests of the independence movements of

inter-territorial sub-Sahara.30 In the growing heat of southern Cameroon’s nationalistic passion,

the UPC staged multiple violent protests and demonstrations in favor of the unification of

Cameroon.31

On January 1, 1960, after a long but relatively peaceful political process, Ahmadou

Ahidjo became the first President of the Cameroun Republic. East Cameroun became a sovereign

nation, ending its fourteen year trusteeship and casting off its eighty year bridle of European rule.

The festivities, attended by the UN Secretary General and multiple other foreign diplomats, were

tarnished by UPC violence in the cities of Yaoundé and Douala, however.32 The British

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Cameroons' process of independence was not as simple as that of their francophone

Camerounian neighbors though. The British Cameroons were torn between two languages, two

governments, and two cultures. In order to determine the future political status of the confused

territories, the UN offered three plebiscite votes to the states of the Cameroons. Hoping for

continued trusteeship status, North Cameroons cast their first vote in 1959, maintaining the status

quo, and staying the vote until an undetermined time.33 Later, in the final plebiscite of 1961, held

simultaneously in both Cameroons, the North chose to integrate with its co-lingual neighbor

Nigeria while the South chose overwhelmingly to reunify with the Cameroun Republic,

becoming the Cameroon Federal Republic.34

There have been many interpretations of how and why Southern Cameroons reunited

with the Cameroon Republic after it obtained its independence. Scholars can offer only theories

regarding whether or not it should have, though. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing until

today, political scientists and historians have asked questions such as, "Why did two bilingual

countries, one Anglophone and one Francophone, unite to form one bilingual union?" and "What

were the causes of Cameroonian nationalism that led to reunification?" The interpretations of

evidence vary considerably, and no two scholars seem to share the same view on any point.

These perceptions vary primarily due to their many regions of origin and the decade in which the

works were written. Yet no one history seems complete; no single history answers every

question presented.

In the years leading up to the Cameroons' independence in 1960 and 1961, and for a

decade after, much of the nationalistic fervor in the region had a central focus. The goal of the

rhetoric of the time was the wresting of power from the hands of the colonial rulers of the day.

Much of the political talk of the late 1950s and early 1960s centered around an idea of one

7


Kamerun Nation. The terms Kamerun Nation and the Kamerun Idea relate to a previous day in

Cameroon's colonial history, when the Germans had drawn the original borders of the colony.35

The Cameroonian nationalist parties of the 50s and 60s became outraged by the imperialist

partitioning of their country, calling for a return of the Kamerun Nation and a reunification of

Cameroon so that it might assume its previous borders. Much of the talk from nationalist parties

spoke of the once-grand Kamerun Nation and its previous glory.36 Nationalist sympathizers like

Ruben Um-Nyobe of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), a nationalist and anti-

colonialist party with Marxist sympathies, utilized this myth as a catalyst for party development

in the years leading up to independence.37 Later his party changed its tune and responded against

the theory that Germany had given Cameroon its borders, and thus, its spirit. He said that

Germany had neither discovered Cameroon nor created its Cameroonians. In his report to the

Congress of the UPC of 1952, he stated, “Tout le monde reconnaîtra que Dieu a créé un seul

Cameroun.” God alone had made one Cameroon and its people, he said.38

The referrals to the Kamerun Idea and Nation are refuted by many scholars, the foremost

being the late Victor Le Vine PhD. Le Vine, an often-cited leader in the study of African tribal

affairs and professor emeritus of political science at Washington University, was one of the first

scholars to write about the struggle of Cameroon in its first years after independence. He spent

four years on the ground in Cameroon during 1960s and saw its independence and reunification

first hand. He states in his multiple books about the event, primarily The Cameroons, From

Mandate to Independence (1964), that Germany could not have had enough time for all the

achievements for which the nationalists give them credit. Having been in control of Kamerun for

less than three decades between the years of 1884 and 1916, less than half the time the

Cameroons had been under the administration of France and Britain, it is unlikely that Germany

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could inspire such nation-building ideals. In fact, he says, the myth of the Kamerun Nation was

used as a political tool with which to drum up support for the independence of French

Cameroun.39

During the 1960s and 1970s, there arose two distinct theories for why Cameroon

reunited. The first, a popular one among scholars of early-Independence history, is called the

Partitioned Ethnic Groups Theory. This theory suggests that Cameroon had ultimately reunited

for tribal and ethnic reasons. The artificial border drawn by France and Britain had severed

ethnic boundaries, separating tribal lands and even families. Edwin Ardener, in The Nature of

Reunification of Cameroon (1967), argues that although the Partitioned Ethnic Group Theory is a

tempting premise, there were not enough tribes cut literally by the border to have justified the

outcry for reunification. While his citations of ethnic population numbers are compelling, they

only tell of vast ethnic populations, not of tribal groups, and are thus difficult to analyze

accurately.40 Ndiva Kofele-Kale, in Tribesmen and Patriots (1981), reassessed this argument by

conducting a case-study in anglophone, western Cameroon in 1972 and again in 1973. His

findings suggest that feelings of ethnic identity and further, nationalism, correlated specifically

with the level of urbanization of the studied region. He found that in rural populations, making

up nearly 90 percent of the total population of Cameroon, villagers and tribesmen had little

knowledge of the towns within twenty miles of their own and even less about the political events

and leanings of their nation.41

The second-most accepted theory of the 1970s, one that seems to have been alluded to in

the works by Le Vine, Kofele-Kale, and Ardener, suggests that there was a different uniting

factor for the Cameroonians. This unifying sense of identity, one that extended across inter-

Cameroonian borders but not international borders, is referred to as Pan-Cameroonianism, or the

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Ethnic Solidarity Theory.42 Drawing from the works of the historians before him, Bongfen

Chem-Langhee, a Cameroonian historian, has written several papers regarding the impetus for

unification. He suggests in “Pan-Kamerun Movement, 1949-1961” (1978) that despite the

cultural difficulties inherent in a bilingual nation, Cameroonians shared a common feeling of

Cameroonian-ness. Though, at the time, a portion of the population of the Southern Cameroons

favored integrating into their neighbor Nigeria, the overwhelming majority felt more kinship

with the French Camerounians than they did with Nigeria.43 While there were many ethnic

groups represented in the Cameroons, they united to form a Pan-Cameroonian movement in

favor of reunification.

Many recent studies have explored the politics behind the UN plebiscites in 1960 and

1961. As the Cameroons approached the 1960s, there were three separate and distinct camps

within their governments. One camp, based primarily in North Cameroons, with some support in

South Cameroons, was referred to as the Integrationists.44 These Integrationists wished to

integrate with Nigeria, their long-mandated partner under British administration. Conversely,

Ahmadu Ahidjo, the Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of Cameroun in the East,

claimed his constituency maintained an unanimous desire to reunite with the North and South

Cameroons.45 However, there was a third camp that is not often recognized in early historical

accounts of independence and reunification. In "Pan-Kamerun Movement," Chem-Langhee

writes that South Cameroons, under the leadership of Premier John Ngu-Foncha, desired

secession from the Cameroons as a whole to become a new independent nation unto itself.46 In

1959, representatives from South Cameroons gathered to discuss what options should appear on

the upcoming UN Plebiscites of 1960 and 1961. The conference, however, was torn by social

and local bickering and accomplished little for or against reunion. Sir Sydney Phillipson, the

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chairman of the Conference at Mamfe, though he was a supporter of succession, wrote a study

that concluded that South Cameroons was not sustainably viable without the support of either

Nigeria or the Cameroun Republic.47 Though delegates at the Mamfe Conference eventually

voted overwhelmingly that the options on the ballot be either integration or succession, the UN

Fourth Committee for the plebiscite was marred by infighting and global politics and did not

hear the requests presented by the representatives.48

According to Langhee, citing multiple government documents, the United Nations denied

the ballot as suggested by the Mamfe Conference for primarily political factors. Britain, a

staunch liberal and anti-communist nation, supported the integration of the Cameroons with

Nigeria, while Russia and the Eastern Bloc backed the UPC and anti-colonial nationalists in their

support of reunification. In reality, while neither the communists nor the capitalists of the United

Nations served to gain anything by the outcome of Cameroon’s independence, the political

agendas of the Cold War determined the fate of Cameroon in many ways. Propaganda efforts in

Cameroon and the UN cast tribalism in a bad light that undermined South Cameroons calls for

secession. Self-determinism was a, "can of worms which, if opened, might have called for the

redrawing of boundaries and endless strife," Langhee says, and from the perspective of the

Cameroons' sponsors, this was to be avoided at all costs.49

Despite the best efforts of the secessionists, the plebiscite of 1961 moved forward with

only two options: integration or reunification. The plebiscite was to be voted on by all adults

born in or having parents both born in the territory of South Cameroons. Not only had the UN

put only two options on the ballot of the final plebiscite, Francophone Cameroun actively

participated in obstructionist politics in the region. In 1960, approaching the arrival of the final

plebiscite, the new Cameroun Republic sent construction equipment to work on the road

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connecting Mamfe and Kumba, two towns that were on either side of the

Anglophone/Francophone border.50 Also, political "hooliganism," led especially by the French

Cameroonian Welfare Union (FCWU), disrupted lectures and intimidated voters. In further acts

of persuasion, it seems French nationalist music was even broadcast via Land Rover equipped

with loudspeakers that was driven through South Cameroons in the days leading up to the

plebiscite.51 As Joseph Lon-Nfi pointed out in his article, “Foreign Influence in Elections in

Cameroon: French Cameroonians in the Southern Cameroons 1961 Plebiscite” (2011), the results

of the plebiscite in South Cameroons may have been considerably skewed by votes from both

French Camerounians and Nigerians. According to Nfi, on the eve of the final plebiscite, the

KNDP, the hyper-nationalist reunification party with Foncha at its helm, ushered hundreds of

French Cameroonians across the border to vote. These French Cameroonians, because it was so

difficult to ascertain their true citizenship in a state with no birth certificates, Nfi argues,

ultimately swayed the vote in the South Cameroons towards reunification.52

Study and debate regarding the true nature of reunification continues after the turn of the

twenty-first century. At the fiftieth anniversary of Cameroon's independence, several scholars

shed further light on the events of the 1960s and the repercussions of its hurried and slapdash

reunification. It seems even today that the region of Southwestern Cameroon wishes to secede

from the Republic of Cameroon to become an independent republic. The Ambazonia Political

Party, taking its name from the native term for the region surrounding the Wouri River, demands

independence from a “cruel form of subjugation by a fellow African country.”53 In his article,

“Occupation of Public Space: Anglophone Nationalism in Cameroon,” written in 2004, Nantang

Jua, a Cameroonian scholar and lecturer at the University of Buea in Western Cameroon,

analyzes the efforts of “anglophone marginalization, assimilation, and exploitation by the

12


francophone-dominated state.”54 These efforts, Jua Says, have gone unnoticed by francophone

scholars of Cameroon. The state's autocratic policies of the last half century have stifled

academic pursuits in the West of Cameroon, and, as Jua states in “Scholarship Production in

Cameroon: Interrogating a Recession" (2002), “intellectual endeavors, though already negligible,

continue to recede.”55 The idea of nationisme, the author’s term for the nation-building agenda

supported by an “ultra-minor elite,” is a project of the authoritarian state's efforts to marginalize

Anglophone Cameroon. The nationalist feelings of South-Western Cameroon are merely an

“unexpected, recent invention,” from the francophone perspective, he says. However,

anglophone nationalism is not a recent development by socio-political elites that were not

“invited to dinner,” as Jua says.56 It has, however, posed a challenge and a threat to the unitarian,

and at times autocratic, nation-building efforts of the state for fifty years. Put into political

context, Emmanuel Yenshu-Vubo, a professor of sociology at the University of Buea, finds that

the reintegration of Southern Cameroons into the Cameroun Republic, and the promise of a true

federation and future autonomy, was offered due to “political expedience” rather than through

the process of popular sovereignty.57 This rushed reintegration, with the Francophone Cameroun

Premier Ahidjo in its charge, was encouraged by the political discord of the UPC's insurrection

attempts.58 These efforts centralized the states functions and prompted the autocratic policies of

the ruling party that have lasted more than five decades.59

Benedict Anderson, a leading scholar of the post-modern world, suggests that a nation is

a socially constructed community of people that may never actually meet. The members of a

nation, an “imagined community”, have but temporal coincidence and are often only aware of

others in their community through written language, shared through news media.60 The

observation that ethnic groups are not naturally occurring phenomena is a fairly recent

13


occurrence in the world of social science.61 An ethnic identity is a fluid and ever-changing

concept of the post-modern world. Accompanying the birth of nationalism, in a process called

ethnogenesis, an imagined community often self-identifies with a race or an ethnicity; these

identities constructed seemingly out of thin air.62 However, the ghosts of race and nation are not

singularly determined by region, tribe, language, or religion. While all of these factors play a

part, the true generation of a nation is imagined, social, internal, and does not rely on any single

source.

Countries, like people, are not born with an identity; they acquire them through a long

process of learning and growth. Martin Lipset, in The First New Nation, admits that the growth

of a national identity is “a process which is a notoriously painful affair.”63 The culture of

Cameroon, it seems, is not just bilingual; it is also bicultural. The imagined, cultural identities of

the British Cameroons have English-speaking Cameroonians as a common denominator, but

scholars of multiple perspectives deny that language is the single defining characteristic of

“anglophone-ness.”64 The culture of South-Western Cameroon has been equally defined by half a

century of “experiences of 'other-ness' and second-class citizenship.”65 In an interview with an

unnamed, “highly-placed Anglophone bureaucrat” in Western Cameroon in 1998, Dickson Eyoh,

a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, Canada, found:

“No matter how bilingual you are, if you enter an office and demand something in French, because of your accent, the messenger may announce your arrival simply as 'une anglo', or respond in a manner intended to mock. You know that stereotypes are a normal part of life in Cameroon and the world over...but the constant reminder that as an Anglophone, you are different, creates the impression that we are second-class citizens.”66

The attempts to characterize a nation-state are “constructs of liberal discourse,” Eyoh

says in his "Conflicting Narratives of Anglophone Protest" (1998).67 These concepts are not

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invented or imagined by the population but are remitted by outside forces. In scholars’ attempts

to standardize and categorized “nation-hood,” nations are further subject to revision and

redefinition. 68 At its heart, Eyoh says, the ongoing issues between cultural and national identity

are indicative of the nation’s experiments in “individual and collective rights to representation.”69

Vubo suggests that the policies of the post-colonial Cameroonian state have intended to

assimilate and extinguish one aspect of that identity. Success in integrating the states of identity

and nationhood “can only be achieved when people are directed to manage the various levels of

identity themselves.”70 Cameroonians may then, “freely consider themselves as Nso, English-

speaking-Cameroonian, and Cameroonian at the same time.”71

Vubo finds two levels of historical awareness of culture: one attached to specific personal

needs and the other characterized by a global understanding of nationhood.72 Inasmuch as the

construction of an imagined community decides who or what a nation is, a nation determines

itself by deciding who or what it is not. West Cameroonians, as recently as 2006, expressed

clearly that they did not identify with the Francophone Cameroun population. They identified

even less with the Nigerians from across the border though, and were often heard grumbling

about Nigerian immigrants who had come to Cameroon to open businesses.73 Can these senses of

shared Cameroonian identity and Nigerian other-ness have led to solidarity within the

Cameroons or at least to an idea of Cameroon-ness? Vubo finds, drawing inspiration from Weber

and Chazan's definitions of cultural identity, that ethnicity is a “subjective perception” that has in

its foundation, a feeling of shared, historical awareness.74 Further, “identity formation is deeply

entrenched at the local historical community level, while it is still problematic at the modern

state level.”75 Can communities, then, learn to live dually within the conceptual identities of

individual culture and national state, he asks? Still, half a century after reunification, many of the

15


people of Cameroon identify most with others in their own small village; their town politics

strongly influenced by inherited tribal hierarchies.76

Stéphane Mallarmé, a French scholar and philosopher, said, “To name is to destroy, to

suggest is to create.”77 To create a name for something as objective as a region of land is a fairly

straightforward affair. The region of Cameroon, its borders drawn by four different rulers within

one hundred years, is named after a derivative of the Portuguese Camarões, the shrimp living in

the Wouri River. By christening Cameroon, the various colonial leaders of the region christened

a group of people as well. In the case of something as vaguely subjective and invisible as a

nation of people, to name is to give to a mere concept a structural framework upon which it may

grow. However, as Mallarmé has suggested, while the concept may grow and change, it is

limited to the framework of the name and may not grow beyond it. Would Mallarmé then say

that the people of Southern Cameroons were destroyed? Were they limited to a life as

Cameroonians, even though they wished to create an independent nation unto themselves?

The framework of this name is complex for the people of South-West Cameroon. While

having been part of the colony of the once-great Kamerun, like their francophone compatriots,

the people of Southern Cameroons do not share either language or culture with the rest of the

Cameroonian population. Neither do they share a common culture with the Nigerians that once

governed them. Yet, they united with their francophone brothers and sisters, and will defend

their Cameroonian nationality as hotly today as they did fifty years ago.78 It would seem then that

the imperialist christening of Cameroon— the naming of a land and a people— is the most

significantly unifying feature of the Cameroonian people's shared identity. By creating a name

for the region Cameroon and by the drawing of its borders, it would seem that the European

colonial rulers provided a framework upon which the pan-ethnic and pan-lingual Cameroons

16


could find solidarity enough to reunite into one federation. It appears the river prawns of the

Wouri, the Ghost Shrimp, are more influential than they once seemed. Perhaps it was not God

who had made Cameroon and its people as Um-Nyobe said; it was the Cameroonian people who

had created themselves.

17

1 A "Njanga" is a shrimp or prawn in Pidgin English, the common dialect of Southwestern Cameroon. A "Mololo" is a fish about the size of a herring. This traditional Cameroonian children’s song is simply about a strange event. Sometimes, something as small as a crayfish can devour something that is larger than itself. Accessed April 29, 2013. http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=2745&c=83.2

Vitor T. LeVine and Roger P. Nye, Historical Dictionary of Cameroon, African Historical Dictionaries, No. 1 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1974), 131.

3 LeVine, Historical Dictionary, 51.

4 Prosser Gifford and W.M. Roger Louis, France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 518.

5 Pat Ritzenthaler, The Fon of Bafut (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966), 5-6.

6 LeVine, Historical Dictionary, 108.

7 Victor T. LeVine, The Cameroons: From Mandate to Independence (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), xi.8

Stephen Jay Greenblat, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 83.9

LeVine, Historical Dictionary, 132.10

Ibid.11

Mark W. DeLancey, Cameroon: Dependence and Independence (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1989), 8-15.12


Ndiva Kofele-Kale, “The Pan-Kamerun Movement, 1949-1961” An African Experiment in Nation Building: The Bilingual Cameroon Republic Since Reunification, ed. Ndiva Kofele-Kale, Westview Special Studies on Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), 27.14

League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22 (June 28, 1919).15

League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22 (June 28, 1919).16

J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver, The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 8: from c. 1940 to c. 1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 616.17

Le Vine, From Mandate to Independence, 193.18

“Take up the White Man's burden--The savage wars of peace” in Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”, 1899.19

Fage and Oliver, Cambridge History of Africa, 616.20

United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, Chapter XII: Articles 75-85 (June 26, 1945).21

Bongfen Chem-Langhee, The Paradoxes of Self Determinism in the Cameroons Under United Kingdom Administration: The Search for Identity, Well-Being and Continuity (Lanham,

MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2004), 5

22 Langhee, The Paradoxes of Self Determinism, 5.23

Langhee, “The Pan-Kamerun Movement,” 25.24

Langhee, Paradoxes, 11.25

Ibid.26

Ibid.

27 Ibid., 198.28

LeVine, Mandate to Independence, vii.29


Ibid., 104.31

Ibid., 135.32

Ibid., 136.33

Ibid.34

Ibid., 100.

35 LeVine, Mandate to Independence, 31.36

Ndiva Kofele-Kale, “Reconciling the Dual Heritage: Reflections on the “Kamerun Idea”,” An African Experiment in Nation Building: The Bilingual Cameroon Republic Since Reunification, ed. Ndiva Kofele-Kale, Westview Special Studies on Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), 12.37

Langhee, “The Pan-Kamerun Movement,” 27.38

Kale, “Reconciling the Dual Heritage,” 3.39

Ibid., 8.40

Ibid., 9 & 19.41

Ndiva Kofele-Kale, “The Political Culture of Anglophone Cameroon: Contrasts in Rural-Urban Orientations Toward the Nation” An African Experiment in Nation Building: The Bilingual Cameroon Republic Since Reunification, ed. Ndiva Kofele-Kale, Westview Special Studies on Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), 67.

42 Kale, “Reconciling the Dual Heritage,” 9.

43 Ibid., 10.

44 Langhee, “Pan-Kamerun Movement,” 51.

45 Ibid., 40.

46 Ibid., 30.

47 Langhee, Paradoxes, 14.

48 Langhee, “Pan-Kamerun Movement,” 55.49

Langhee, Paradoxes, 13-14.

50 Joseph Lon-Nfi, “Foreign Influence in Elections in Cameroon: French Cameroonians in the Southern Cameroons 1961 Plebiscite” Cameroon Journal on Democracy and Human Rights, Vol. 5: No. 1 (June 2011), 60.

51 Ibid., 60.

52 Ibid.

53 Bouddih Adams, “Ambazonia Political Party Formed,” Up Station Mountain Club (July 23, 2004), http://www.postnewsline.com/2004/07/strongambazonia.html (accessed April 20, 2013).

54 Nantang Jua and Piet Konings, “Occupation of Public Space, Anglophone Nationalism in Cameroon (Occupation de l’Espace Public, Le Nationalism Anglophone au Cameroun).” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Vol. 44: Cahier 175, (2004), 610.55

Nantang B. Jua and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, “Scholarship Production in Cameroon: Interrogating a Recession” African Studies Review, Vol. 45: No. 2 (2002), 71.56

Jua and Konings, “Occupation of Public Space,” 610.

57 Emmanuel Yenshu-Vubo, “Levels of Historical Awareness: The Development of Identity and Ethnicity in Cameroon,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Vol. 43: Cahier 171 (EHESS, 2003), 596. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4393316 (accessed March 7, 2013).

58 Ibid., 596.

59 Ibid., 596.

60 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 1983).

61 Christopher A. Airriess and Ines M. Miyares, “Exploring Contemporary Ethnic Geographies,” Contemporary Ethnic Geographies in America, ed. Ines M. Miyares and Christopher A. Airriess (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 6.62

Wilber Zellinsky, The Enigma of Ethnicity: Another American Dilemma (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 43-44.63

Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 18.

64 Jua and Konings, “Occupation of Public Space,” 610.

65 Ibid., 628.

66 Dickson Eyoh, “Conflicting Narratives of Anglophone Protest and the Politics of Identity in Cameroon,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies (1998), 263.

67

Ibid., 249.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid., 271.70

Vubo, “Levels of Historical Awareness,” 621.

71 Ibid., 621.

72 Ibid., 560.

73 Graham T. Baden, “Cameroon Journals,” (2006). The Author spent six months volunteering for Non Government Organizations in Cameroon during the first half of 2006, and recorded rigorous notes of the experience.

74 Vubo, “Levels of Historical Awareness,” 592. See N.R. Chazan's Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa (1992) and Max Weber’s concept of “Verstehen.”

75 Vubo, “Levels of Historical Awareness,” 591.

76 Baden, “Cameroon Journals”.77

Stéphane Mallarmé, interviewed by Jules Huret, Enquete sur l’Evolution Littéraire (Paris: Fasquelle, 1913), 55-65.

78 Baden, “Cameroon Journals”.

i A "Njanga" is a shrimp or prawn in Pidgin English, the common dialect of Southwestern Cameroon. A "Mololo" is a fish about the size of a herring. This traditional Cameroonian children’s song is simply about a strange event. Sometimes, something as small as a crayfish can devour something that is larger than itself. Accessed April 29, 2013. http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=2745&c=83.

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hist.final.imagining a bilingual nation.COMPLETE€¦ · Web viewIn the first years of the 1960s, a series of states under the administration of France and Britain, called collectively