God the Politician

4. The Ndu Genocide

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The Ndu Genocide olitical language is bad language’ wrote George Orwell in his essay titled ‘Politics and the English Language’ when he was condemning the subjectivity that dominates political speeches and partisan newspaper reports. He omitted to include the hypocrisy that characterizes diplomatic language that is a subset of the former. This gap was filled by Jeffery Hughes, an Australian writer and the author of I Accuse, a book supremely sympathetic towards the sufferings of Anglophone Cameroonians. According to Hughes, diplomats, under the pretext of good manners or gentlemanliness, avoid calling things by their true names. It is obvious for this reason that the United Nations is reluctant to qualify as genocide the massive killings in Dafur that are being carried out by the Janjaweed militia sponsored by the regime that rules Sudan. World bodies easily describe as genocide the Holocaust during the Second World War in which over six million Jews were exterminated in Nazi concentration camps and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were shot or hacked to death by extremist Hutus. These world bodies erroneously think hundreds of thousands or millions of lives have to be lost at a particular time or within a short duration for it to be termed genocide. They forget that although thousands of people may not be killed physically, a scene could be so devastating that it leaves an indelible mark on their psyche. Such persons may be described as psychologically dead, although still breathing, eating and talking. Between 6 and 12 June, an event occurred in the little town of Ndu in Donga-Mantung Division in the Northwest Province, details of which the world would have missed if two extraordinarily courageous persons had not braved all the odds to monitor and keep a record of. The two dreadnoughts are Michael Ndi, a journalist, and Denis Maimo, a photographer. Maimo committed suicide after he witnessed the event. He did not want to ever set eyes on a gendarme again. In view of the atrocities committed in Ndu within that one week, I have decided to uphold the view that it was genocide, in open defiance ‘P 30 of all the barking diplomats in the world. Naked Truth about that Ndu Genocide (The Tongue of an Eyewitness) by Michael Ndi, one of the valiant human rights defenders just mentioned, is my principal source of inspiration in the story that follows. Genesis of the Carnage Although the genocide effectively took place in June 1992, the root causes began a year earlier. On 20 May 1991, the hardcore opposition parties which since initiated Operation Ghost Towns and the civil disobedience campaigns, decreed a ‘zero 20 May celebration’ (20 May is Cameroon’s national day). The opposition stalwarts of Ndu and its peripheries, notably Ngarum, fanatically blocked outlets from Ndu prohibiting the movement of people to and from Nkambe, the divisional headquarters of Donga-Mantung, for the national day celebrations. Mighty stones, burning tires and the bodywork of worn-out vehicles were mounted, especially on the NduNkamebe highway. Placards such as ‘No more 20th May Celebration in Nkamebe’, ‘Ndu is Over Ripe for a Sub-Division’. ‘We want a National Conference’ and ‘Enough is Enough Biya’ were posted on all the walls along Ndu Motor Park. By 2.05, the Fon of Ndu, who had sneaked out to Nkambe for the national day, arrived in the smoky, barricaded Ndu town with Nkambe administrative officials. The Fon was visibly as angry with his people for humiliating him by trying to check his movements, as the people were with him for defying the 20 May boycott decision. The Fon was all the more vexed that opposition activists refused him right of passage by ignoring his call for the dislodgement of the barricades so his car could pass. He was therefore reduced to trekking across the motor park to the Travellers Lodge, a popular hotel at the time. The journey was not undertaken in silence. The Fon called on his people to give peace and dialogue a chance. He might as well have been addressing the rolling hills of Wainama or any other inanimate objects. When the population chose to respond, it was by booing and jeering the Fon, a type of indignity which no human being can bear even if he or she is the most hardened stoic philosopher. Women joined the men in making an idiot of their traditional ruler, thereby making his humiliation all the greater...