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

64. Bilingualism: A Badge of Honour or Shame?

261 64 Bilingualism: A Badge of Honour or Shame? Friday, 08 February 2008 Shortly after his installation as General Manager of a major State Corporation in Douala last week, the newly installed General Manager held a press conference during which he categorically refused to make any pronouncement in English. He had been pressed by a reporter to make a statement in English for the benefit of the English-speaking audience, but he bluntly replied; “Je vais parler en français!” Not long ago, another top official, a Minister of State again at a press conference, made it clear that he was not going to take any questions in English. Period. It cannot be said that these gentlemen, like many other Anglophobes who hold high office in Cameroon, were in breach of any law. The constitution provides for the use of two official languages i.e. French and English, but does not make it compulsory for any official to use the two languages interchangeably. That would be a tall order indeed. It could, however, be said that while the constitution allows the use of any of the two languages in the conduct of public affairs, the hostile attitude of the Francophone hegemony towards the English language, which up till the 1996 revision of the constitution was considered subordinate to French, is tantamount to a breach of the spirit of the constitution. What realistically obtains in Cameroon is what linguists define as diaglosia wherein two different language groups operate in their language of origin with the hope of achieving a reasonable measure of intelligibility. The one speaks in English and the other in French and the experiment goes on. 262 The use of language is a cognitive, not intuitive, process and to think that we have had bilingualism as a cardinal policy of national unity since 1961, one cannot help questioning why the present generation of Francophone public officials and managers should prefer to exhibit a negative and unfriendly attitude towards the English language. If one bothers to find out, he would discover that the negativity of those who publicly display this phobia do actually understand and speak English. These are usually the very hypocrites who have overcrowded Anglophone colleges with their offspring and wards to the extent that Anglophone children do not have it easy gaining admission because, unlike Francophones who have unlimited access to the state coffers, not many Anglophone parents can promptly fulfil the requirements for their children’s admission into these schools. It is an open secret that while Anglophone parents can barely manage to installmentally settle the exorbitant tuition and boarding fees in especially the Anglophone mission colleges, which have no doubt, established high academic and moral standards over the years, the affluent Francophone parents are not only prepared to pay the annual fee at a go, but are in the dubious habit of making fabulous and unsolicited ‘donations’ to the school authorities presumably as an inducement or compensation for ‘taking good care’ of their offspring. The corruptive nature of this practice could readily lead to discriminatory treatment of students and compromise the ethics of equal opportunity and merit. When Francophones hasten to enrol their wards in Anglo-Saxon educational establishments, one is bound to suspect a hidden agenda behind their motives. Cameroon has been operating an unwritten principle of regional and linguistic balance, even though, in reality, attempts to achieve that balance have been severely flawed by bias, dishonesty and majority complex in favour of Francophones. Attempts to achieve regional balance have been plagued by the inequitable sharing of the national wealth and the excessive exploitation of the Anglophone 263 minority’s natural resources, notably oil for the benefit of the Francophone hegemony. Apart from natural resources, the distribution of power and authority has put the Anglophones at the beggarly end of the equation and even the little they hold in terms of public office would eventually be taken away from them and given to the new generation of Francophones who would quickly brandish their Anglo-Saxon qualifications as a justification for monopolising power and authority. Language is a cultural and scientific asset, which has yet to be valorised in Cameroon. One would expect that by now the government should have devised a formula for rewarding public officials who practice bilingualism rather than condone those who merely pay lip service to that policy. Granted that the inability to demonstrate mastery of the two official...