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)

2. The party’s roots: the North West Province origin & setting

22 Chapter 2 The party’s roots: the North West Province origin & setting he SDF is a North West Province creation. This was the party’s birthplace in a violent clash at Bamenda May 26, 1990. The province has sustained the party ever since. It will remain its core area under any conditions that may lie ahead as it struggles to remain the only viable survivor from more promising days, 1990-1992, when Cameroon’s politics seemed poised for democratic transformation. But the electoral cycle since the SDF’s formation, largely conducted against all “fair and free” standards, has proved impervious three times (1992, 1997, 2004) to change in Paul Biya’s presidency of Cameroon as head of the CPDM. And SDF performance in the most recent National Assembly election, 2007, confined its membership largely to North West Province, whose people elected 14 of its 16 parliamentarians (there are 24 seats in the province, 180 nationwide). Its niche built there may not be replicable elsewhere. Whether the province can continue as the primary source of SDF activity and policy, if it wishes to develop nationwide, is among the party’s urgent issues. There is a constant, glaring paradox. The more national the party acts in a country with a 75-80% francophone, 20-25% anglophone language identity division, and with myriad minority interest groups, the more it risks losing its support in anglophone North West to the Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC)’s more exclusively, anglophone politics than its own, never formally legalized (discussed in more detail below). But the more it tends its local anglophone terrain, the less easy it is to cultivate Cameroon at large. The 250 mile distance from Bamenda to the national capital two provinces away, Yaounde, is both the SDF’s potentially broadest highway and currently narrowest cul-de-sac. The North West’s 1,250,000 people and 8,000 square mile terrain are as ethnically and geographically diverse as any in Cameroon, but the SDF largely united the province in 1990. It rallied with great conviction at the party’s inception. With all the agitation surrounding Yondo Black, Célestin Monga, and Pius Njawe elsewhere in Cameroon, 1990-1991, as their antiT 23 government ink and acts provoked trials and demonstrations,with some casualties, Bamenda, May 26, 1990, was the truly defining place and time for confrontation, moving Cameroon’s opposition politics from more confined space and familiar procedures into the streets. Thousands of security forces invested Bamenda, where up to 250,000 people live, work, or trade, when the SDF’s plan for a founding rally that day became known. The rhetoric and occasional rocks from tens of thousands who filled the streets after John Fru Ndi’s inaugural speech at Ntarinkon Park provoked police gunfire that killed six young demonstrators.32 With articulate, inspired leadership from Fru Ndi, and martyrs in their graves, a localized anglophone challenge to the regime turnedinto an ever more national conflict that became insurrectionary within a year, directly engaging or indirectly affecting millions more Cameroonians as a general strike in the latter half of 1991 paralyzed public services and business in a four province arc from Bamenda east and south toward Yaounde and into the hub of commerce, industry, and shipping, Douala. Bamenda itself in 1991 consistently turned out 10,000 people three times a week for opposition rallies at a site renamed “Liberty Square” to honor the dead, and up to 50,000 for special demonstrations. North West people continued to support the party, most notably during a two month state of emergency after October’s presidential election was declared a narrow victory for Biya over Fru Ndi (39%-36%), the SDF candidate and the likely victor in a rigged poll. Supporters surrounded Fru Ndi’s compound and used tree trunks and burning tires on the approach roads to defend him against the threat of removal to Yaounde and whatever might follow, certainly detention, likely worse. Periodic clashes dot North West ever since, small but sometimes fatally violent, between regime “law and order” forces and SDF militants, often as arrest orders meet resistance. The province has a “hard” reputation for stubborn resistance on the SDF’s behalf, including Bamenda’s massive rallies and arson against properties owned by CPDM notables and the reputation Kumbo (aka Banso), its second largest town, has earned as “Baghdad” for its persistent recalcitrance.33 24 The party also...