The Shame of Collaboration[1]
Colonialism is dehumanizing and unacceptable. It is a violation of basic human rights. It is a crime against humanity and Southern Cameroonians this day claim the self-defense right to resist colonialism at all cost including violence.
Caught in the middle ground of the dialectical Manichean dance of death between the colonized and the concolonists[2] are a permissive and pernicious cabal of happy- go- lucky pirates indulging in the shame of collaboration.
Joshua Osih, vice president of the opposition Social Democratic Front, a political party created by Southern Cameroonians and identified as a Southern Cameroons political party claims the paternity of words to the effect that he had told every member of the SDF to learn French so as to better fit in the Camerounese system. Per Osih, this is now policy in the SDF.[3]
Kenneth JEAN Begheni Ndeh has one foot in and one foot out i.e. his mouth to the West and his stomach to the East or has he?
One Nfor Susungi now plays the ultimate magician by claiming that a 1960 ‘Joint Communiqué’ that sanctioned one of the Foncha-Ahidjo parlays is actually a Treaty of Union between the Southern Cameroons and La Republique du Cameroun.
Etc.
An obscure obscurantist called Dennis Tambe Mukefor rants on the Internet in his doomed m’as-tu-vutism and puerile attempt to ape the concolonizer’s official discourse which discourse runs to the effect how those crusading for the restoration of the statehood of the Southern Cameroons are secessionists.
Tikum Mbah Azonga, an obscure lecturer in the University of Bamenda says the same thing in many words. And Tikum Mbah Azonga did provoke the ire of Barrister Charles Taku, member of the Arusha Tribunal and Committed Southern Cameroonian Restorationists:
The Southern Cameroons Cause has been misunderstood or misrepresented as a struggle to defend a colonial legacy. Simply put, it has been represented as a struggle to assert a colonial linguistic supremacy of English over French. Even apologists of the neocolonial regime over the Southern Cameroons like Tikum Mbah Azonga have propagated this misinformation in attempts to trivialize our cause.
I asserted then and I will do so now, that these are mere attempts to reframe our cause differently before trivializing it.
This is an approach that seeks to and indeed unites most of the people of Republique du Cameroun against the Southern Cameroons. And this is the same rationale which neocolonial France and the Aujoulatists have advanced to justify colonial rule in the Southern Cameroons. For them, an insertion of the so-called "bilingualism clause" into the Constitution of Republique du Cameroun comprehensively resolved this colonial absurdity which your Highness like others present as the Southern Cameroons Case. Elsewhere in the past, Tikum Mbah Azonga, pointing to his bilingual credentials presented himself as a model of what Southern Cameroonians should struggle to become to be accepted as totally assimilated neo-colonial puppets of La Republique colonial rule. In other words Southern Cameroonians must struggle to become counterfeit and assimilated citizens of La Republique to be able to scramble for recognition and relevance to be trusted with second rated jobs as second class citizens.
This categorization and trivialization of the Southern Cameroons cause is what we in the Southern Cameroons student movement in the Younde University fought against. It was this resolve that led to the emergence of the Southern Cameroons Youth League, Southern Cameroons trade unions, Southern Cameroons teachers Unions and Southern Cameroons parents associations. This perverse mischaracterization of the Southern Cameroons cause unites citizens of Republique du Cameroun and formed the foundation of the governments response to our case. This is the bedrock and the gravamen of the attempts by the government of Republique du Cameroun to evade any discussion or recognition of the Southern Cameroons history, and critical events concerning the Southern Cameroons identity. Thus, it was subversive to even contemplate mentioning 11 February 1961, 1 October 1961, Southern Cameroons historic leaders by name, the system of education that exists in the Southern Cameroons, our values system and our very existence as subjects of international law with erga omnes rights protected as such in international law. Official and unofficial publications concerning the so-called 50th anniversary of re-unification traced but the history of Republique and the road that led to annexation and colonial rule over the Southern Cameroons. Historic leaders like S.A George, Dr Foncha, Dr Endeley, N.N Mbile, Martin Foju, Rev. Chief Kangsen, Ajebe Sonne, P.M Kemcha, Ngom Jua, S.E Ncha, P.M Kale etc are simply ignored or consigned to mere footnotes and dismissed.
These publications tell volumes and will help us refocus international opinion on our case. Therefore, this deliberate mischaracterization of the Southern Case as a mere craving for a lost colonial legacy through the English language is what significantly radicalizes the resolve of Southern Cameroonians to reassert their sovereignty by any means acceptable in international law and diplomacy.
Mischaracterizing this case from the reassertion of international; legality encapsulated in UN Resolutions, the UN Chapter obligations, supported by general international law and customary international law to a mere begging for a recognition of the right to use the English language in educating our children and conducting public affairs is what I have tried to condemn in the strongest terms.
However, this mischaracterization of our cause is also one of the elements that has united Southern Cameroonians on the struggle to protect a common identity, which is a struggle for survival for us and posterity. That is why over and above the struggle for material gain, even the renegades get beaten and almost always return to the fold. The South West/ North West divide sponsored by the government of Republique du Cameroun under circumstances arose from this resolve to trivialize and reduce the Southern Cameroons cause. Several issues of an internal political and economic manner exist among Southern Cameroonians from those zones. But Dr Endeley and N.N Mbile were able to break through and won Nkambe and important constituencies in the Northern Zones. I put this issue to Hon N.N Mbile during a Journalist Conference in Victoria, and he affirmed that where elections to be conducted in the Southern Cameroons any day any time, they were still sure to win over those constituencies. During the Bakassi case, I asked Hon Mbile why he was not even consulted as of then when his contemporary T.O.S Benson was prominent on the Nigerian side. He earnestly regretted that Cameroun was never ever intent of recognizing their contributions to history. Hon Mbile was not just a prominent politician but a journalist with the Nigeria Daily News and a contemporary of Zik of Africa the Owelle of Onitsha. Even Um Nyobe and others who met him recognized his power of argument which he surely obtained as a great trade union leader in the CDC. Um himself came from this trade union background.
Now having failed to break the resolve of the Southern Cameroons by sponsoring this NW/SW putative divide which is invoked on occasion to stifle a common stand on matters of common interest, the regime has concentrated most in breaking our teachers and students unions. They have discovered that mere comments by a few individuals in mass media magnifying this divide is nullified by the collective resolve our MPs even in the colonial Parliament, our students unions, our farmers and agricultural unions, our transporters unions, our parents/ teachers associations, our lawyers associations, our cultural associations, and our teachers associations unites the Southern Cameroons in all its components and renders this divide nugatory. This unity can not be construed as avenues to assert a colonial legacy under the prism of protecting the English language. I submit that until and unless the Southern Cameroons Cause is recognized and respected, all discussions of joining forces to confront a common adversary will be circular, pedestrian and ill-conceived. The simply reason is that those who purport to oppose the regime and the regime itself as united in purpose and intents against the Southern Cameroons and in misrepresenting its cause.
Chief Charles A.Taku
Where the individual is defined as subhuman on account of racism, one understandable reaction is to aspire to the group from which he or she is excluded. This explains the posture of the numerous collaborators in the Camerounese system who may want to believe that they are part of the establishment but who are really treated as outsiders by the local cocolonists ie ‘colonizers of a colony.’ The “Anglophone collaborators” thus remain what they are – strangers, l’ennemie dans la maison, interlopers, intruders and unassimilated at the very heart of “our society” and system (Sartre 1995:83): Strangers singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land. “Ce morceau est trop gros pour un anglo” or this morcel is too big for an anglophone is the manner in which the francophone system treats even its most heel-clicking collaborator.
To paraphrase Sartre, however, the life of the collaborator is to live in a situation of inauthenticity: for authenticity ‘is to live to the full his condition as an anglophone; inauthenticity is to deny it or attempt to escape from it’ (Sartre 1995:91). This alternative for the persecuted subject, to live in a state of authenticity or inauthenticity, was to inspire Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). For Fanon, the colonial subject is not only denied his or her freedom and reduced to an object; he or she is unable to be fully human at an individual level: colonial oppression works at the level of psychology as well as in material form. If existence precedes essence, as Sartre argued, then the essence of the colonized subject aspiring to a ‘white mask’ is one of inauthenticity and bad faith. Sartre’s section in Being and Nothingness entitled ‘The Look’, one of the most acute analyses he ever wrote, was a particular inspiration for Fanon – and subsequently for Lacan in his account of the Gaze, as well as the many discussions of various looks and gazes that followed in European feminist and film theory. Fanon’s genius was to recognize the implicit gender and class position in Sartre’s account of how, at a phenomenological level, the individual experiences the Other as an object. Soon, the looker finds himself looked at in turn and becomes conscious of himself as an object, or rather of seeing himself seen as an object: ‘I am no longer master of the situation’ (Sartre 1958:263–8). In Sartre’s account of how a lack of self-worth is mediated by the look of the Other, Fanon recognized an insight into the mechanics of how colonialism was able to produce a sense of inferiority in colonial subjects, of the psychopathology by which the concolonized individual was led to experience him or herself at one remove as an object. The look turns the subject into an object: ‘I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. The concolonial subject constantly oscillates between the two states, internalizing the concolonial ideology of inferiority and being less than fully human – until he, or she, assumes responsibility and chooses authenticity and freedom.
Sartre’s Hegelian training enabled him to recognize that power was a dialectical phenomenon, that torturer and tortured, racist and victim, concolonizer and concolonized, the empowered and disempowered, were locked in a symbiotic relation in which the first could not escape the consequences of his relations with the second. The split between colonizer and colonized, internalized by Fanon to provide the kind of Manichaean schizoculture so forcefully analysed at the beginning of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), is drawn directly from Sartre’s model in which colonizer and colonized are ‘similarly strangled by the colonial apparatus, that heavy machine’ (Sartre 1964:51).
Caught in the very incongruity of every decolonization struggle are those who, because they are powerless before the blazing guns of the colonizer, now turn their pent up anger against their very own fratas conjurati with murderous rage. Read Fanon: you will know that, in their time of powerlessness, murderous madness is the collective unconscious of the colonized. This contained fury, instead of exploding, goes nowhere and ravages the oppressed themselves. To free themselves of it, they end up massacring each other: the tribes fight against each other, Internet wars break out, and the language and tone becomes warfarist because they cannot challenge the real enemy. You can count on the Agents provocateurs, the collaborators and on colonial policies to nurture their rivalries; the brother raising the knife against his brother imagines he is destroying, once and for all, the detested image of their shared debasement. But these expiatory victims do not quench their thirst for blood; they stop themselves marching into the machine guns only by becoming our accomplices: they, by their own initiative, will accelerate the progress of the dehumanization which they reject. Under the amused eye of the concolon.
Caught up in that system, transformed into an oppressor or torturer, the colonizing subject also finds himself in a condition of ontological ambivalence: ‘both the organiser and the victim;’ as Fanon put it, ‘of a system that has choked him and reduced him to silence’ (Sartre 1976a: 724; Fanon 1980:10).
A Manichaean dance of death indeed.
Or is it?
Fanon posits that indigénat, as a vista of colonization, is a neurosis introduced and maintained by the colon among the colonized with the consent of the colonized. Colonisation itself is a neurosis maintained among among the colonized with the consent of the colonized. And only the colonized can end it.
While Sartre focuses on the racism of anti-Semitism, his analysis is applicable, by inference, to all colonial ideologies supported by racism. The war showed him that life was not simply a series of existential choices against circumstance: that the domination of power turns the subject into an object: in this situation, freedom is constituted by taking responsibility to transform oneself back into an agent. According to Sartre, a refusal to accept that freedom, which for Sartre defines man, reduces the individual to a state of inauthenticity. In the situation of anti-Semitism, as Sartre acknowledges, the choice of freedom and assuming the responsibility of authenticity requires considerable courage.
According to Sartre, Fanon and Guevara, at the end of the day, it was through revolution that the oppressed could attain their own humanity as well as their freedom. ‘At the level of individuals’, wrote Fanon, ‘violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction’ (Fanon 1965:73). Sartre, who began by abhorring violence on ethical grounds, ended by advocating it as the only necessary counter-response by those subjected to it.
There is always a day of reckoning with every colonial system and that day hits with a bang and great violence. While those who have maintained the dehumanizing system in place know the scorecard and read the scorecard as the meet reward for their own violence, the ‘liberals’ worldwide tend to be dumbfounded. The “liberals” would now claim that they should paid more attention to Southern Cameroonians : they now recognize that we were not polite enough with the Southern Cameroonians, that it would have been fairer and more prudent to grant them certain rights as far as possible;
They asked for nothing better than to be admitted in batches and without sponsors into that very exclusive club – our species and system: and now this barbaric and mad outbreak is upon us. The Parable of the Avenging Angel is just one Fanon Lesson that the Camerounese colonial state ought to learn.
[1] From the manuscript of Long Walk to Freedom Land by Ntemfac Aloysius Nkong Ncwhete Ofege. 750 pages…and counting… of hell.
[2] Concolonist is my especial neologism to characterise the ‘colonizer of a colony.’
[3] Interviewed.
By the way, Kenneth JEAN Begheni Ndeh, in case of have learnt nothing from the executive meddling with the judiciary that underpins the Bapes Bapes Case, permit me ask you this question:The Southern- West Cameroon is founded upon a democratic culture which itself legates to the Southern-West Cameroon a WAY of Life.Now, Old boy, this culture cum ethos cum WAY OF LIFE has 9 sauce-making items.I will name them again and I will ask you this question: Which of these items is found in your Camerounese state that you now want a Southern-West Cameroonian to champion?Those paradigms, not necessary in any order, include:
1. State of law, the respect of the law and equality of all before the law thereof.
2. Freedom of expression (speech) of the press and of conscience.
3. Freedom of movement and settlement
4. Freedom of association, religion and trade union (groupings).
5. Freedom of the people to choose the leader (s) by any form of electoral process, which process must be free and fair.
6. a governance system that allows for grass root or popular (majoritarian) participation in government, state institutions and decision making in one form or another;
7. Checks and balances within state-government institutions.
8. Freedom of enterprise, especially economic enterprise; the right to employment, fair salary, etc.
9. Guarantee of fundamental rights or a Bill of Rights - rights to life, freedom from inhuman treatment, slavery and forced labour; right to personal liberty and property; right to family and private life and, yes, FREEDOM FROM DISCRIMINATION.
In Victor Epie Ngomelian terms...what God has put asunder.....
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Ofege Ntemfac <ntemfacnchwete@gmail.com> wrote:
The goes the hallucinogens again leading miserably into astral travels or voyages into the inter-galactic.--On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 3:29 PM, Pa Fru Ndeh <PaFruNdeh@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few years ago, I had written that the GREATEST threat to the ruling party CPDM,will in fact be the CPDM itself. Slowly but surely, the ruling party CPDM willeventually crumble off of it's own weight. It is happening as predicted a fewyears ago.Again, as all things CAMEROUNIAN, when it is in the process of crumbling theywill do all in their power to pick up the pieces BUT, when it has eventually crumbled, theywill turn the corner stone that was rejected, a lender of last resort, to rebuild the nation -a PAAWCE.Blessed Be Cameroon
Pa Fru Ndeh__._,_.___
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The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
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The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
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