Snapshots: An X-ray of Cameroon�s Democracy, Governance and Unification

47. Violence Begets Violence

189 47 Violence Begets Violence 20th July, 2007 Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanity. Humbug of humbug, says the radical, all is humbug. You all know, ladies and gentlemen, that when we say in pidgin that “Massa no hambog me; you di hambog plenty” we understand it to mean: don’t pester me, don’t disturb me, don’t be a boor, you are such a nuisance! Words have a plastic quality and fluidity, which intrinsically permit them to assume multiple semantic faces. And so, brothers and sisters, my sermon this evening is about violence and to remind you that violence of violence, says the revolutionary, all is violence. The choice of the theme of violence has been triggered by an overflow of adrenaline that has been poisoning and contaminating the blood veins of the fictitious body politic called ‘La République du Cameroun’ that, in recent weeks, has been caught in a frenzied atmosphere of election fever. The attitude, actions and pronouncements of political actors, confused militants and sycophants of partisan political associations have become such a great cause for concern that if someone does not sound the alarm, we, both gangsters and bystanders, will find ourselves engulfed in a senseless mayhem of actual, not virtual, backstabbing, butchery and savagery. Revenons à notre mouton. Now, when we talk of violence, what are we talking about? It is the use of force to cause harm, pain and suffering. The impression we all have is that violence, of necessity, is physical. Violence is physical. It is also moral, spiritual, and psychological. The operational phrase here is: to cause harm. And for what purpose? Egoism, self-aggrandisement, envy and greed. When Cain murdered his brother over an issue of offerings to God, that was a sheer case of envy, jealousy. And when King David dispatched 190 his top army general to the war front so he could get killed and so he could get the general’s wife to bed, that was a sheer case of covetousness. Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife! These may be deadly sins, but the deadliest sin is greed! Seneca, the venerable ancient Greek philosopher, it was, who observed that “gluttony (the love of money) is the root of all evil.” Geoffrey Chaucer, in the 14th century, re-echoed this aphorism in the Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner’s Tale, to be more specific. Very few philosophers, ancient or modern, have ever been against money (material well-being). Certainly not. They crusaded and shall always crusade, against the ‘LOVE of money’. The sheer love of it! The sheer love of money, wealth and accumulation of wealth, power, just for the sake it. And this business of greed (langa throat) has increasingly become so rampant during the past two decades that even a pope cannot fold his arms, genuflect in piety, without violently sounding the alarm. Of course, His Eminence, Cardinal Tumi, has done so. So, after that, what next? Those who engage in violence or have been tagged and stigmatised as violent just because they have dared to demonstrate, in public, their bitter discontent with a political arrangement that has reduced them to sub-humans, zombies, in a land well-endowed by God, are for all intents and purposes NOT VIOLENT. Those who have engaged in acts of violence (and they are well-known) are the upstarts and brigands who have made a duty to inflict on a society (of which they lay no claim to have built or nurtured) almost irreparable damage; a damage that could easily result in carnage. When a Prime Minister, Head of Government, makes a punctual electoral home-coming visit to his so-called area of origin and declares that “everybody is free to militate in any party, but here in Buea and Fako in general, we (whoever we is supposed to be) shall not accept the opposition. Militants of the opposition parties should go to their area of origin for militancy.” The PM reportedly vomited this unfortunate statement in Buea a few days ago and for this kind of declaration to come from a prime minister-cum stool pigeon; from someone you would expect a certain modicum of decency, smacks of 191 mischief and desperation. And when he talks of areas of origin, what, in God’s name, is his own area of origin? Someone could be referred to as ‘Lagos boy’, on account of the...