Fwd: [Camreview] FW: There was West Cameroon

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thomas chu <tmchu02@msn.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2013 11:22:13 -0400
Subject: [Camreview] FW: There was West Cameroon
To: menchum Elements <menfa-usa@yahoogroups.com>, Kumiyeh Group
<ukumiyeh@yahoogroups.com>, Cameroon Review
<camreview@yahoogroups.com>

To: cameroon_politics@yahoogroups.com; cameroonpatriots@yahoogroups.com;
southerncameroon@yahoogroups.com; exnucs-zaria@yahoogroups.com;
atrusa@yahoogroups.com; pamolites@yahoogroups.com
From:
esimoyamboka@yahoo.com
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 17:54:05 -0700
Subject:
[cameroon_politics] There was West Cameroon










By Mwalimu George
Ngwane*

The title of
this article is inspired by that of Albert Chinualumogu Achebe's most recent
memoirs "There was a country". The book defines Chinua Achebe's life and
experience during the Biafran war of 1967-1970. We all know that Achebe took
the Biafran side in the war and even served his government as roving Cultural
Ambassador. True to his maxim that 'all writers should be commited,they should
speak for their history, their beliefs and their people', Chinua Achebe's new
compelling book could be interpreted as a parallel between his Biafra and the
West Cameroon statehood even if the birth and demise of both are not hinged on
the same historical trajectory. Achebe's book comes on the heels of
the official
state burial of Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegbwu Ojukwu, the Ikemba of Africa, who
stood up in arms against the Nigerian government in quest of a Biafra
nation and
yet was buried a few months ago in the most glamorous pattern reserved only for
time-tested heroes.
Since
President Paul Barthelemey Biya'a bi-Mvondo announced the commemoration of the
Golden Jubilee of our country's Reunification, Buea, the maternity of West
Cameroon, and her correlated neighbours have been abuzz with state-centric
meetings. My friend Baffour Ankomah, Editor of the London-based NewAfrican
magazine emailed me the other day to find out when the commemorations proper
shall take off, but I told him that here in Cameroon we run most of our affairs
on a Muslim calendar (you keep on guessing when the moon shall emerge in order
to take a date with the Ramadan feast).

Reunification is a historical
fact that carries with it individual narratives and corporate establishment
intrigues inherent in every nation building experiment especially in Africa.
Whoever mentions Reunification in Cameroon inadvertently evokes German
Cameroons, Southern Cameroon, Republic of Cameroon, Federal Republic of
Cameroon, West Cameroon and East Cameroon in that order. The irony is that our
Reunification frenzy coincides with the commemoration of the ruby jubilee of a
contentious 'Peaceful Revolution' which took place on 20th May 1972. 20th May
dissolved the spirit, letter and faith of the Reunification bond or what was
left of it. And most of us dead or alive were either out of complicity or
complacency accomplices to this 'revolution'.

My father was not only a
devoted educationist but an unconditional party militant as far back
as the days
of the Cameroon National Union (C.N.U) when he would clad his children in C.N.U
"ashwabi" in our very tender ages. The climax of his perceived party loyalty
was on 20th May 1972 when he shepherded my siblings and I to the
Customary court
Hall Bamunka, Ndop, to vote for the Unitary state. I was only twelve
years old.
But I know why he did so.
As Headmaster of Council School Bamunka,
he was invited on 11th February 1972 and on the Council school field to coach
pupils who had failed their examinations and decided to abandon school. My
Headmaster-father thought there was no better anecdote than the one that even
the then President of Cameroon El Hadj Ahmadou Babatoura Ahidjo had failed the
First school Leaving Certificate yet rose to become the nation's Head
of State.
Four days after his public anecdote, plain clothes military officers swooped
down on my father and locked him in the dreaded Brigade Mobile Mixte (B.M.M) in
Bamenda. It was traumatic for me as the eldest child whose mother had been
estranged from her husband. I had to attend to the rudimentary house chores and
I was just twelve. My father was released thanks to a book called "As told by
Ahmadou Ahidjo" from which he had lifted his anecdote that read "He
(Ahidjo) was
an inattentive but intelligent pupil and easily passed from one class
to another
until 1938 when he failed at the C.E.P.E (First School Leaving
Certificate)"p.6. Therefore carting his three politically under-aged children
into his Renault 4 to vote for an issue they did not master must have been, by
my father-HM's reckoning, atonement for what his detractors or a local
overzealous administration termed an insult to Ahmadou Ahidjo. Yet I
voted and I
was only twelve.

By some twist of fate, some twenty years later (March
1990) I was arrested and detained in the B.M.M Ekondo Titi, Ndian
Division while
I was a secondary school teacher in Mundemba. It must have been traumatic for
my first child (Masango) only two years old, seeing his father being dragged
around by four gun-totting gendarmes and ordering his paternal grandmother (Ma
Agatha) to lie on the floor and his own mother (Mami Masango) braving
the ordeal
while in the pangs of labour of birth to his younger sister. The young girl
(Nzele) was actually named while I was serving two weeks of detention in the
B.M.M. My crime was that I in collaboration with three colleagues
(Ebini, Mengot
and Njong) had published a newsletter called "Viewpoint" in which we had
questioned the efficacy of bilingualism in Cameroon when a Minister of
Education
(Mr Joseph Mboui) could not speak English to the students in Mundemba but worse
still why we as civil servants were levied to pay for the Minister's visit to
Ndian division. But this is another kettle of fish.

History has
recorded the development fortunes of West Cameroon before my 1972
vote. History
has it that West Cameroon had the trappings of sovereignty albeit minimal when
compared to Abeid Karume's Zanzibar but maximal when compared to
Chinua Achebe's
Biafra. The Buea Declaration of April 1993 catalogues the nativity and
crucifixion of West Cameroon in one of the most scientific discourses of our
times. Adolf Mongo Dipoko has just published a new book called "The Anglophone
Soul" which joins other organic intellectual voices in providing legal and
legitimate catharsis for the West Cameroon statehood.

President Biya's
call for the Reunification jubilee is indeed the cherry on the cake. Local
support committees for this Reunification jubilee have been constituted with
members drawn from highly respected individuals but some of whom, without
President Biya's recognition of this historical fact, would have guillotined
anyone who dared to raise his or her voice about Reunification. That is the
paradox of revolutions. As a civil society actor and writer in
politics, I know
that nation building is not just a process, it is a project - a project that
enables stakeholders to set out specific objectives, measurable impact,
attainable goals, realistic rationales and time-bound monitoring and evaluation
templates. Nation building is about the past informing the present and the
present shedding light into the future. Nation building is not just about
platitudes on peace, integration and unity as it is on social justice and
equitable relocation of resources following the attendant law of
derivation.

Even if West Cameroon is today a figment of yesterday's
memories, memories which are at variance with the forces of today's realities,
we must use this Reunification jubilee to channel the individual angst, the
collective frustrations and nostalgia into some creative dialogue. The
Reunification Jubilee provides us Cameroonians with a platform to engage those
who hold religiously to yesterday's memories and those who cling tenaciously to
today's realties. Reunification at 50 means we have come of age to expand our
democratic space and deepen our democratic content through public debate. The
Reunification Jubilee provides all of us an opportunity to assess the
development dividend and development deficit of West Cameroon since the Federal
bond was snapped on 20 May 1972. Such an evaluation should carry the
full weight
of the Reunification malady whose comparative diagnosis of the development
status of West Cameroon from 1961-1972 on the one hand and from
1972-2011 on the
other hand would eventually impact on the formulation and implementation of the
country's policies after the Reunification Jubilee commemoration.

Is it
not just reasonable that the territory which was the precursor and product of
Reunification and that swore to make Reunification work should now be on the
scanner as a polity in her own right? Would it be asking too much if we at
this moment put on the spot a wedlock where the excesses of one of the spouses
seem to defy the logic of parity and partnership to embrace the law of the
winner-takes-it all? As for me it would be suicidal to allow this golden
reunification to be a lean harvest of isolated infrastructural gains and a
bumper banquet of ego-massaging rhetoric while the macro vision of a national
renaissance project remains peripheral. Posterity shall, like we are today
heaping blames on the West Cameroon forbears of Reunification, hold us
accountable if we fail to frontally address the gangrenous issues that underpin
this defining moment of our golden binary existence.

*Mwalimu George Ngwane has just released a new
book titled "The Cameroon Condition" 240 pp, April 2012 (an Anthology of 3
previous works) published by Miraclaire Publishers, Kansas, Missouri and
obtainable online at Createspace.


"In the end, what we will remember is not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.




--



The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in
a thing makes it happen.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ambasbay" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ambasbay+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.