"The Prospect Before Us" By Joseph M. Ndifor

In response,  Cameroon’s President Paul Biya— a wily and cocky politician, who has ruled Cameroon with an iron grip for the last thirty five years—promised reforms, but reneged on the promise a few months later—instead ordering the arrest of thousands of Anglophones who now languish in Cameroon’s notorious prisons.

What began as a lawyers’ and teachers’ protest soon morphed into a vortex of political and cultural nationalism, when last October, unfazed by Biya’s crackdown on the protesters, Anglophones unilaterally declared an independent state— The Federal Republic of Ambazonia —for themselves.  The immense feat of having this freshly-minted state recognized by African countries —and other countries around the world —was placed in the hands of an interim government.

The Biya administration —and to some extent those not conversant with Cameroon’s Anglophone history—have raged against that declaration of independence, calling it a cheap shot at secession. Among Anglophones, however, the declaration evoked old memories of Southern Cameroons, their one-time, self-governing territory that was dissolved (through Cameroon’s government machinations), and for which they are today yearning for its restoration.

Not until October 1961, when Anglophones got stuck between the rock and a hard place—I’m referring to the arbitrary October 1959 United Nations order, which mandated  that Anglophones choose, by October 1961, either to be integrated into the Republic of Nigeria or join the Republic of Cameroon (they chose the latter) —Anglophones freely elected their own prime ministers, had their own police force, had their own judiciary, had their own parliament, had their own educational system and had their own semi-independent state, called Southern Cameroons.

Fifty seven years later, Southern Cameroons — or “West Cameroon”, as it was later known (both names no longer exist) — is a shell of its old self. Its aforementioned institutions, which were already under assault during President Amadou Ahidjo’s reign, have been annihilated since Biya’s ascension to power in 1982.

This is what has roused Anglophones’ resentment against the government over the years. It’s one of the darkest chapters in the Republic of Cameroon’s history, but unlike like Germany and the United States— two countries that have courageously made amends for their past iniquities associated with Nazism and slavery, respectively—President Biya and his administration have neither acknowledged, nor are willing to find solutions to these issues that Anglophones today collectively refer to as “The Anglophone Problem”.

Buoyed by the notion that justice is on their side, Anglophones have deployed an array of actions once successfully used by British colonies —in their quest for independence—to exert pressure on the Biya regime to relinquish its rigid control over their territory.

Last October’s peaceful declaration of independence, the numerous non-violent demonstrations that followed and the “ghost towns” currently being strictly observed in the Anglophone regions, perfectly capture Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha or Passive Resistance, the weapon that Gandhi brilliantly used against Britain as India strived for its independence.

And like Gandhi, who once wrote—“To Every Englishman”— that, it wasn’t the British people whom he was attacking but the system of British Administration—Anglophones have, throughout their protests, profusely said their attacks aren’t aimed at Cameroon’s majority French-speaking citizens; rather, they are protesting against Cameroon’s government assimilationist policy, which targets them.

The grisly response to these peaceful protests by Cameroon’s military—in which a 92-year-old woman was reportedly burnt to death in her hut in the village of Kwa Kwa —has drawn the world’s attention to the plight of Anglophones, thousands of them who currently live in refugee camps across neighboring Nigeria, because of this climate of fear.

There were dissenting views a few years ago on whether the demise of Sam Nuvalla Fokem, Akwanka Joe Ndifor, Albert Mukong and Bobe Jua had muffled the voices of those who could rekindle the Anglophone cause on the world stage.

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