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149 10 The Collapse of the French Empire in Africa T he French have received more than a fair share of my critical attention since 1990. I have voluntarily and freely given the French very important strategic advice of the type I also gave His Excellency Paul Biya, particularly in 1990. Elsewhere such advice would have been given under secret cover and I would have been called an “‘expert consultant” and paid heavily. But in both cases (can a pupil be expected to do better than his teacher or a disciple better than his master?) my valuable free strategic advice was not only completely ignored but treated with disdain as can be clearly seen from the seizure and continuous detention of The Past Tense of Shit (Book One). By the way, they succeeded in seizing and detaining (or destroying?) the book, but can they also succeed in seizing and detaining or destroying its contents? The answer is blowing in the wind. By the way again, after a series of procedural false starts, Book Two of the Past Tense, entitled I SPIT ON THEIR GRAVES, with a Foreword by Ni John Fru Ndi and an Epilogue by Simon Munzu has finally been published by an American publisher. Copies should reach Cameroon in the coming weeks. Please, book for your copy with the nearest CamPost person or dépot to you. As democratisation has probably made some progress since 1993, we shall surely attempt to arrange a launching ceremony for the book (backed by CRTV publicity) when it arrives here, at the Yaounde Municipal Town Hall, among other places. We were talking about the collapse of the French Empire in Africa. The French Empire in Africa is fast collapsing. From a distance I had sighted this approaching collapse and attempted (unsuccessfully) to advise the French in their own self-interest that their best bet lay in siding with the majoritarian masses and genuinely and honestly supporting democratisation in Africa rather than in their continued propping-up and support of rapacious dictators and repressive regimes. Even from the present very close quarters, some 150 Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy people are still unable to see the fast-approaching collapse of the French Empire in Africa. Myopia. Some Cameroonians are still inseparable from their French suits and get overly excited over rumours of the type “The French have already chosen Biya’s successor for 1997.” Read Book Two of the Past Tense. The French can never complain of being ignored or treated with levity in that book. When they went to the Francophonie summit in Mauritius in 1993 and solemnly declared that the main purpose of that body was to combat “AngloSaxon cultural imperialism” did I not describe the declaration as “Quixotic” and ask what they thought would happen were the AngloSaxon world to retaliate in self-defence? The Anglo-Saxon world has never bothered to react but shortly after the Mauritius summit, Rwanda, a Francophonie country, declared for English in preference to French as its “national language.” Recently, Algeria, another Francophonie country; where, since the fifties, French neocolonialism has murdered thousands of people and provoked genocidal civil strife to protect French interests, has declared English its first national language and relegated French to second place. In France itself, films, advertisements and music in English have been proscribed from all public media. But this has only helped to intensify their attraction for young French people. Elsewhere I have drawn the contrasts between the French and their other comrades in (neo-)colonialism, in their various styles and modus operandi. I need not dwell on that again here. But do you think that the gains of English over French are because English in itself is in any way better than French? It is a fact, as I have remarked before, that French as a language, is smoother on the lips and sweeter in the ear than English. That is why, when it comes to talking, francophones will always out-talk Anglophones any day, anywhere. And, moreover, they always supplement their very fine talking with frantic manual gestures and bodily postures reminiscent of any conductor of a classical orchestra. Should the unusual happen and you outclass a francophone in sheer talking, he would usually resort to “des instructions d’en haut” to silence you and win what he had lost in a fair talking combat. For culture and leisure, for joking and empty rhetoric, for amorous canticles, love lullabies and sweet nothings, the French language has...

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