Whether Losing, Whether Winning. Essays in Political Realism: Essays in Political Realism

3. The dual heritage

[11] 3 The dual heritage his man, the Cameroonian that is, with such a rich array of paradoxes, has a past, even if he spends some of his genius trying to obviate this fact. He has a past as surely as he has a future; for Cameroon lived before him and will outlive him. Those who were are no more; those who are will soon be no more. Historians of the Cameroonian station know the road the country has travelled since its birth. It is a road that has gone through German rule, Anglo-French trusteeship, federalism, the unitary state, to what is now just the state. Each of these stations on the country’s journey into the future has etched a specific mark in its face, so that today one cannot talk about Cameroon without referring to those indelible marks. Any politician who fails to see and respond to these marks also fails in his enterprise as a politician. Culture What then are these distinguishing marks? They are cultural first of all. The culture referred to here is not those time-old practices of our ancestors that are woven into the very fibre of our essence, but the acquired, exogenous imprint of western intrusion into our social consciousness. Cameroon as we know it today is a bi-cultural construct that combines aspects of French and British culture following the dual tutelage of these powers exercised during the trusteeship years. That is why today French and English are Cameroon’s official languages. French is in use in what was formerly the French Cameroons, and English in what was known as the British Southern Cameroons. This cultural specificity has given rise to two qualifiers: francophone and anglophone. These qualifiers are not linguistic. They are geo-cultural. They have to do with roots buried in a T [12] specific place. A Francophone is therefore not any Cameroonian who speaks French but rather a Cameroonian whose roots are in, or are traceable to, that part of Cameroon east of the Mungo and formerly under French trusteeship. Similarly, an Anglophone is not any Cameroonian who speaks English but that Cameroonian whose roots are planted in, or are traceable to that part of Cameroon west of the Mungo and formerly known as the British Southern Cameroons. By dint of this understanding, one will notice that there are Anglophones who do not understand a word of English, Anglophones whose sole language of communication is French. These are Anglophones born and bred in the Francophone part of the country. Similarly, one will notice that there are Francophones who are totally alien to the French language, born and brought up as they are in the Anglophone part of the country. This Anglophone/Francophone duality is really the storehouse of our national identity and strength and should be seen and projected as such. This is where the importance of history as an ideological tool becomes paramount. The duality should be understood in complementary terms, not in conflicting opposition. And it is the duty of historians to demonstrate how this is possible. It is they to take us down memory lane and show us how and why we undertook the journey that has taken us to where we are today, and in so doing help us to take full and patriotic responsibility for our past. The duality referred to above indicates that these two peoples have not always lived together. Reunification is understood as “retrouvailles” (reunion), meaning that there had been “séparation” (distancing) at some point, and that therefore the two components had gone their separate ways for some time. These historical facts must be assumed if we intend to make meaning of our present. Rather than try to hide them or behave as if they never happened, we should strive to come to terms with them and see what strength there is to be derived from the wealth of divergent but [13] essentially complementary experiences that they propose to us; for it must be said that we cannot cause the past to disappear with a wave of the hand. These divergent experiences return us to the trusteeship mandates traversed by the two territories subsequent upon the seizure of Kamerun from Germany by the Allied Powers and the partitioning of the territory between France and Britain in the Franco-British Declaration of 1919. If the Second World War had not occurred, German Kamerun would most probably never...