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)

7. The SDF’s current condition and future prospects

80 Chapter 7 The SDF’s current condition and future prospects ooking now to the present and future in Cameroon-wide terms, the SDF’s and John Fru Ndi’s conditions are difficult and prospects are uncertain, and subject to agendas set in environments of politics and policy making they do not control. They are also, as his posthumous 2002 text makes clear, targets of condemnations “from the left” like Mongo Beti’s; we have noted Beti’s last years’ past tense usage for the party and its leader, consigning them to the realm of lost causes. Beti knew the UPC and um Nyobe in the 1950s. He worked with the SDF and Fru Ndi in the 1990s, and it was only the regime’s rejection of his nomination papers that prevented his National Assembly candidacy for the party on very hostile South Province terrain in 1997. He compared his UPC and SDF experiences and judged the latter harshly.90 Acknowledging that Cameroon lacked the autonomous political agency of a “véritable elite bourgeoise” to support Fru Ndi, he resorted to the ultimate jibe, characterizing him as “une espèce de petit bourgeois...extrèmement prudent,sans envergure/scope.” His tone here (against Sklar’s advice, cited above) resembled the constant dismissal of Fru Ndi, by even more hostile critics in the regime and the press than Beti himself, as “le petit libraire/the little bookseller” who lacks the schooling and substance to understand and apply what was in the books he sold to create some of his early capital. For Beti, this precluded a consistent analysis of power in Cameroon and its concomitant, a capacity for the SDF and Fru Ndi to resist power’s cheaper temptations and to build its proper foundations. Beti wrote of telling Fru Ndi about the SDF’s need to keep its distance from institutional politics, while cultivating local support: “ce n’est pas d’aller au pouvoir, c’est d’attendre, d’organiser le peuple en comités de proximité en favorisant la solidarité de quartier,” calling for the insurrectionary convergence of an autonomous intelligentsia and local resistance cadres. The SDF has neither met this standard nor createdMehler’s “idéologie [or] base sociale concrète” referred to much earlier in L 81 this text. But with all the limitations imposed from outside and of its own making, like the inconsistency of its choices to contest or boycott elections, it is among Africa’s longest surviving opposition parties of c.1990 vintage. Its tenacity drives any case to be made for the SDF’s potential as an exception to the generic defects and failures of such parties in Africa. This text has thus far argued for a popular and institutional SDF presence to be reckoned with, but, attuned to standard scholarship, may not have done full justice to this determination and the courage that has brought its leadership and rank and file this far. Such imponderable factors, if not yet conveyed, merit emphasis (risking repetition) in order both to clarify the recordand to suggest it will be difficult to dislodge or break the party, even if it has been kept from the authority it seeks to govern Cameroon and is itself error prone since its “heroic” phase, 1990-92. Peaceful rallies by tens of thousands of SDF members and supporters neutralized armed state power in Bamenda during those years. Perhaps 50,000, unarmed, advanced on security forces with guns ready in their front ranks to forestall a march I witnessed, October 2, 1991; the soldiers backed off as carnage loomed, but there are gravesites and amputees in Bamenda from that day’s (and other’s) grenades. Party members disarmed and killed a state security man with a gun at a 1992 Yaounde rally. Rubber bullets slightly wounded Fru Ndi at Bafoussam in 1991, as did a water cannon attack on his car in Yaounde, 1993, when he took refuge in the Dutch embassy. Bamenda’s people consistently defended his person against regime efforts to remove him. During the two month state of emergency, late 1992, locals tracked troops as they moved, and felled logs and torched tires to deny their road access with heavy weapons and vehicles deployed to crush the SDF. Hundreds of people at a time surrounded Fru Ndi’s compound to thwart his seizure. They (as earlier stated) included members of takumbeng, a Grassfields title society for senior women, with symbolic standing and active roles as “mothers” to the Founding...