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Foreword
- LANGAA RPCIG
- Chapter
- Additional Information
v Foreword This work is the outcome of a Political Cultural and Legal Anthropological Research as well as Socio-Economic Research carried out by the author between 2004 and 2009 in the Bakassi Region on the impact of the Bakassi conflict and post-conflict confidence-building and peace-building logistics and strategies for the rehabilitation of Bakassi and its victims. The usage of the term Bakassi in this research includes the Bakassi peninsula region proper and its contiguous extensions as far as the Sea port of Idenau in the Fako Division extending to the large fishing village of Bekumu to Bamusso and their environs; as well as the coastal fishing villages of the Ndian Division to Ekondo Titi, Musongiselli, Isangele, Rio del Rey and Akwa/Achibong, Atabong (Idabato) East and West and Jabane I and II (see Map 1). The work is intended to serve as first hand exhaustive information on the true live situation in Bakassi today derived from the personal experience on the field by the author. These data were systematically collected during the course of the years of very keen intensive field work and a lot of investigative tact and strict documentation. The term Bakassi engenders many meanings loaded with many conflicting emotional, spiritual and material interests to the various stakeholders, actors and agents. Those actively involved in these new ideographic and parachronic representations of Bakassi, do not seem to care much about the enriching diachronic historiography of the native peoples who have been transformed into victims of this confusing synchronic superficial interpretations that are given by the new stakeholders. Hence this once abandoned space has suddenly become the arena for spawning the new myth of appropriation and occupation, which is being auctioned on the world political culture flip chart and international socio-economic crude oil and fishing stock markets. And so while the cosy talking shops are being celebrated by the brilliant political marketing information technology agents and experts, the oil companies and the fishing trawlers are getting stingingly rich on a daily basis. vi Meanwhile the Bakassi natives are systematically disinherited of their ancestral cultural heritage and socio-economic space of their sustainable livelihood by the new occupants made up not just of the oil companies and the industrial fishing trawlers, but also of the economic scammers who put on the false masquerades to dance in the name of the Bakassi native people who have been rendered voiceless in their own motherland. This is the reason why this book is intended to serve firstly, as a policy research and a policy evaluation document to activate advocacy and give voice to the voiceless; and secondly as a critical historiographic cultural anthropological material for researchers, students, policy makers, government officials, economic stakeholders and international investors, who would like to get the truth about the Bakassi native people. The Bakassi natives are not only being bastardised and humiliated but also scammed by unscrupulous Cameroonians who identify them as non-Cameroonians with the intention of gradually occupying their ancestral lands and rendering them homeless and voiceless; and deprive them of the natural resources of their sustainable livelihood. This is the time for the Cameroon Government to sit up and live up to its corporate social responsibility of good governance prescriptions before it is too late before the dehumanising situation and of recurrent human rights abuses of the native Bakassi peoples degenerate into a new conflict. ...