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Preface
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Betrayal of Too Trusting a People vii Preface As ‘saltwater’ or white colonisation in Africa was drawing to an end, sadly a new and dangerous situation of black-on-black colonisation was emerging in parts of the continent. Some states, themselves beneficiaries of the right to self-determination, soon became latter-day colonisers of less fortunate peoples in countries that happened to be their neighbours. Imperial Ethiopia laid claim to Eritrea, Morocco to Mauritania and Western Sahara, Cameroun Republic to the Southern British Cameroons, and apartheid South Africa to South West Africa (Namibia). Other states with expansionist ambitions also made legally indefensible territorial claims and grabbed vast border areas within neighbouring countries: the claim of Somalia to northern Kenya and to the Ogaden region in Ethiopia, of Libya to the Aouzou Strip in Chad, and of both Nigeria and Cameroun Republic to the Bakassi Peninsula in the Southern British Cameroons.The formal basis of these claims has always been a supposed ethnicity and/or historical connection. In truth, however, the primary reason for the claims is economic – a craving for access to critical resources such as minerals, oil, gas, cash crops, water, and the sea. But in international law, all these claims are expansionist and destabilising and have therefore never been accepted by the international community. Today, all but two of these claims have been abandoned. Cameroun Republic has still not ended its annexation of the Southern Cameroons and Morocco has also still not ended its annexation of the Western Sahara. By hopelessly continuing to hold on to their respective colonial pretensions, Cameroun Republic and Morocco have chosen the path of defiance and violent confrontation. While Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara has received extensive international attention, Cameroun Republic’s annexation of the Southern Cameroons hasescaped international notice and therefore concern. Many reasons account for this. First, the United Nations (UN), creator and supervisor of the international trusteeship system, and the United Kingdom (UK), trustee power for the Southern Cameroons for almost half a century, aborted the process of decolonisation they had set in motion, denying the Southern Carlson Anyangwe viii Cameroons sovereign statehood. Second, the colonial takeover of the Southern Cameroons was not as flamboyant and dramatic as Morocco’s seizure of the Western Sahara. The takeover proceeded surreptitiously, through political subterfuge and in a creeping way. Third, Cameroun Republic, the new colonial authority in the Southern Cameroons, has over the years put in place strategies aimed at concealing its colonial occupation from the world, aware, as it must be, that colonialism is now perceived like rape and robbery combined and a contemporary form of slavery. The strategies it has deployed are many: the international isolation of the Southern Cameroons so that few people are aware of the problems faced by its people; a policy of impoverishment of the territory and its population so that the people are unable to challenge the coloniser or fight back; a policy of terror towards the population carried out by an occupying army with licence to abduct, imprison, rape, torture, plunder and kill in order to secure submission and maintain the colonial occupation; a of sustained attack on the people’s inherited educational and legal culture, denying them their right to to exist, their right to cultural development and destroying their identity, their specificity and their individuality as a distinct people with a well defined territory attested to by international boundary treaties. Another of Cameroun Republic’s egregious strategies consists in making token and decorative placements of a few citizens of the Southern Cameroons in its colonial administration (a leaf borrowed from French colonial practice). This serves Cameroun Republic strategically by assimilating the people of the Southern Cameroons, English-speaking, in the French world of Cameroun Republic, camouflaging the dependent status of the people of the Southern Cameroons, and pacifying the people of the Southern Cameroons lest they rise and revolt (as they are duty-bound to) against their colonial oppressors. This book is a critical study of the colonial takeover of the territory and people of the Southern Cameroons by Cameroun Republic, highlighting the complicity of the UN and the Trustee Power, the UK Government. The book has twelve chapters. Chapter one gives a brief historical background of the Southern Cameroons from its colonisation by white foreign powers to the inception of [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:22 GMT) Betrayal of Too Trusting a People ix its colonisation by a black alien state, Cameroun Republic, its...