Cameroon's Social Democratic Front: Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party (1990-2011): Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party (1990-2011)

4. Anglophones & Federalism

44 Chapter 4 Anglophones & Federalism ts genesis more than a quarter century ago, long before its formal launch in 1990, reveals the party’s anglophone bearings.56 Previous writings about Fru Ndi and the SDF in circulation outside Cameroon tell nothing about his earlier activity, especially during the 1970s in Great Britain, which there was good reason not to disclose during Ahidjo’s presidency, given the high mortality of UPC leaders and the menace of Cameroonian and French security and intelligence services. Born in 1941, educatedin Bamenda and then combining school and work directed towards the civil aviation field in Nigeria during his early twenties,Fru Ndi returned home when the Biafra-Nigeria war ended his studies in 1966 and moved from selling food and newspapers on Bamenda’s streets into ever larger enterprises. He was prosperous by the mid1970s , operating in the private sector with his Ebibi Book Center and agricultural product lines and on contracts with government ministries and cooperatives. The SDF pre-history began when his business and educational trips to England in the years following the 1972 referendum, which dismantled federal Cameroon and attached anglophones to an auxiliary or subordinate role in the Ahidjo state apparatus, connected Fru Ndi with students and exiles in London. The students included Tazoacha Asonganyi, on his way to a doctorate and professorship in Yaounde before becoming in 1994 the SDF’s secretary-general, a post he held until resigning in 2006. Chief amongst exiles there was Ndeh Ntumazah, founder of the One Kamerun Party in 1957, an anglophone surrogate for the banned UPC. In contact with UPC survivors in France from the early 1960s, Ntumazah kept up that advocacy and a human rights critique against Ahidjo and then Biya, mobilizing London-based organizations like the Cameroon Democratic Front and the Committee for Human Rights in Cameroon, and publications like Cameroon Monitor. Fru Ndi learned from and helped fund this network of dissent abroad. Fru Ndi’s early adult years, then, included orientations to both anglophone and more broadly “left” dissent, without I 45 drawing him directly into politics at home. He was 43 when a watershed episode for anglophones took place, the “New Deal” Congress in their largest city, Bamenda, which turned Ahidjo’s Cameroon National Union into Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, with invitations issued for fresh initiatives. Tracts and pamphlets ranging from the economy to schools brought anglophone grievances into the open, and there were also more systematic writings on governance and the constitution across a federalist-secessionist spectrum. Those who tested these liberalization waters experienced, selectively, both the regime’s toleration and prosecution, but when the CPDM introduced a multiple candidacy electoral wrinkle within its one party rule in the later 1980s, Fru Ndi sought both local and National Assembly nominations in 1988's elections. Unsuccessful, he charged,because of CPDM misconduct and bad faith, he led “Study Group 89" in secret Bamenda and Yaounde meetings about more sweeping political change late in 1989, during his own and others’ travel on business and football affairs (he was president of Bamenda’s PWD first division club). Here, when the SDF’s genesis moved to its birth threshold, a crucial branching, perhaps a permanent parting of SDF waters if not remedied in future, took place; it remains highly controversial and troubles the party ever since. Dissenting francophones also mounted challenges to the CPDM and Biya toward 1990 as democratization agendas spread, especially among law professionals identified with Yondo Black. Bridgeheads like the University of Yaounde, the Cameroon Bar Association, and newly formed human rights groups were available and were used for soundings between the language communities of dissent, but anglophones in Bamenda feared regime infiltration of any movement based in the capital that involved francophones. Their views included, beyond this pragmatism, a hard line determination among some leading anglophones to make any new political formation’s highest priority the reversal of their language community’s thirty years of increasing subordination since Cameroon’s independence and reunification. This core group of Fru Ndi plus ten other anglophones, designated as the SDF’s 46 Founding Fathers, held high honorific and substantive roles in the party from its inception until at least 2000, though they are since diminished by age, moves abroad and death. They included one member whose activism had already cost him a decade in Ahidjo’s and Biya’s prisons, Albert Mukong. He was designated...