Nomads: The Memoir of a Southern Cameroonian

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105 8 ver half a century has gone by, and as we look back at Southern Cameroons, one thing is so stark about this so-called “reunion with our brothers and sisters across the Mungo”: it has been a most expensive reunification for the Southern Cameroonians. We have, in the process, lost almost everything we had before joining East Cameroon, yet the abusive and equally exploitative trend is still forging on like ever. In many ways, the Francophone dominated government makes Anglophones to feel that we do not belong, we are not native to the Republic of Cameroon, and indeed, we are not. The government treats us as national bastards, the side effects of cold war politics, refugees of history fashioned by the vicious diplomatic trend of a now irrelevant era, destined never to belong, at best nominal nomads to be called this today and that tomorrow. Hence, in his anger and frustration, the late Anglophone scholar, Bate Bessong, declared us “beasts of no nation.” We rejected Nigeria of our own freewill to join citizens of La République du Cameroun, with whom we once belonged, even under the Germans, before being partitioned and served as compensation to France and Britain, only to find out belatedly that the cultural punch of British and French ways had transformed, if not deformed, each group beyond recognition. The truth is there are some amongst us who, with good reasons, think enough is enough, and so we should go our separate ways. Yet there are others who think we have put in too much just to turn around and walk away like O 106 that—our labour forces have been exploited, our resources drained, and our institutions obliterated or fractured at the very least. This latter group thinks we ought to stay and fight for recognition and equality. Yet how does one reason with a people whose heads are buried in sand pits? How does one reason with a people who refuse to be honest, even with themselves, the basic spice for any relationship or social interaction. Have we not tried dialoguing only for Mr. Paul Biya and his cohorts to declare a national conference “sans objet”? Yet in a most unashamedly arrogant manner, he and an accursed few squander our national resources as if they are privately owned, while the rest of the population is willing to sit quietly, afraid to speak up. In the process, shockingly, some continue celebrating along tribal lines who is in office and who is not, as if a tribesman being appointed minister or prime minister immediately guarantees welfare for individuals of the said ethnic group or the ethnic group as a whole even. The French-speaking majority has attacked everything West Cameroon in this union, contaminating what they cannot eradicate or destroy at once. If not for the fact that for once, Southern Cameroonians remembered their history and stood up as one voice against destructive changes, what would have happened to our most effective system of education? They would have abolished it for some démodé Napoleonic curriculum. Yet, here are students from La République du Cameroun abandoning the old Napoleonic curriculum their leaders are clinging to, which even the “motherland” had rejected, to benefit from a tried Southern Cameroons’ system of education. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, the Cameroun nation uses her troops to attack, torture, and kill Southern 107 Cameroonians without any qualms. When Southern Cameroonians protest, they are branded insulting names like “Biafrans” or “the enemies in the house,” yet they refuse to sit like civilized people to listen to our complaints. Denying addressing the truth does not make it go away; the onus is only postponed with this display of irresponsibility. How can we forget then that we do not belong in a nation where one sleeps with one’s eyes open, a nation where leaders are thieves, a nation that unleashes armed rag tag soldiers to kill their own citizens because they are Southern Cameroonians and so are expendable? Has everything not been done to destroy Southern Cameroon? The latest trick being to separate us into two different units, and now they continue to remind one unit––the South West—of its closer cultural similarities with the Douala’s instead of their historical belonging with the Grassfielders? If the Bakweris will permit such an amorphous argument to persuade them and pit them against the other Southern Cameroons’ unit, then...