Cameroon: Traumas of the Body Politic

By Emmanuel Konde

Cameroun was conceived in 1947 at the Unicafra Congress in Douala, attended by all the aspiring political actors, from which sprung Racam (Rassemblement Camerounais) that declared itself the Cameroun government in embryo. Shocked by that effrontery, the French colonial state immediately banned Racam. From the ruins of Racam emerged Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) in 1948 that stood opposed to French policies in Cameroun. It opposed France in Cameroon for ten years until the French assassinated its leaderRuben Um Nyobein September 1958. In January 1959 France decolonized and granted Cameroun independence at a time when the people were still reeling from the trauma of Um Nyobes death. Cameroon: Traumas of the Body Politic examines the traumatic events that have shaped the contours and influenced the trajectory of Cameroons political history from the 1940s to the 1990s: the momentous power shifts of 1958 and 1959 in the two Cameroons; rupture of coastal and hinterland cooperation in Southern Cameroons; the political revolution called anlu that changed the course of politics in Southern Cameroons; the disappointment of reunification and the genesis of the Anglophone Problem; Ahidjos quarter-century reign of terror; the succession schism, attempted coup dtat, political liberalization, and the New Deal Society experiment; the quest for multipartyism and Operation Ghost Town, etc. These events are explored anew through critical analysis, synthesis, and re-interpretation with uncommon explanatory power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503528468

Emmanuel Konde

Emmanuel Konde is Professor of History at Albany State University (ASU) in Georgia. Prior to joining the faculty of ASU, Konde taught at Tuskegee University, Morris Brown College, Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta College, and Knoxville College. Emmanuel received the United States Senior Fulbright Scholar award for teaching and research in Sub-Saharan Africa for the 1998-1999 academic year, and spent his Fulbright year abroad teaching and researching at the University of Buea in Cameroon. Born in Cameroon, West-Central Africa, Emmanuel moved to the United States in 1978 to pursue postsecondary education. He earned the B.A. in Political Economy from Hillsdale College in 1982, the M.A. in Political Science in 1984, from Northeastern University, and the B.A./M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History in 1985 and 1991, respectively, from Boston University. Konde is the author of six book length monographs: The Bassa of Cameroon (1917, 1998); European Invention of African Slavery (2005); African Women and Politics: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Male-Dominated Cameroon (2005); Bassa Antiquity in Contemporary Limbe (2010); African nationalism in Cold War Politics (2012); and The New African Diaspora: Anatomy of the Rise of Cameroon’s Bushfallers (2012). Emmanuel has contributed several articles to scholarly journals but his most cited are two specialized working papers in African Studies: “The Use and Abuse of Women in African Nationalist Politics: The 1958 “Anlu” In Cameroon” (1990), and “Reconstructing the Political Roles of African Women: A Postrevisionist Paradigm” (1992).

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Copyright © 2015 by Emmanuel Konde.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5035-2845-1

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 Cameroon In Contemporary African Politics

Chapter 2 The Upc Struggle Against Decolonization

French Decolonization Designs

A Profile Of The Mortgagor

The Birth Of Nationalists And Collaborators

French Colonialism Vs. U.p.c. Nationalism

French Colonialism’s Last Stand

Chapter 3 Momentous Events And Men Of Conviction

European Colonial Enterprise In Africa

Bassa Social Organization And Resistance To Colonialism

Kom Social Organization And Resistance To Colonialism

Um Nyobe And Jua: Idealism And Principle

How Ntumazah Became An Upéciste

Chapter 4 Origins And Evolution Of The Anglophone Problem

Origins Of Anglophone Marginalization

Politics Of Grievances Reconciliation

The Problem In Perspective

The Anglophone Problem?

The Economic Argument As Anglophone Marginalization

The Political Argument As Anglophone Problem

Origins Of The Anglophone Problem

Toward Unification Or Assimilation

Chapter 5 Ahidjo’s Decolonized Cameroon

An Inexorable Movement Of History

Foncha And The Politics Of Powerlessness

Rivalry Within The K.n.d.p.

Dismantling Anglophone Politics

Ahidjo’s Power Base

Chapter 6 The Succession Trauma

Designating A Successor

A Case Of Opposing Political Visions

The Eclipse Of Ahidjo

Echoes From The Colonial Past

Chapter 7 Biya’s New Deal Society

New Deal Society’s First Phase

The Second Phase

Chapter 8 The Opposition And The Politics Of Multipartyism

Of Class, Tribe, And Regionalism

Toward A Multiparty System

Albert Womah Mukong, 1933-2004

What Manner Of Opposition Politics?

The Yondo Black Affair

Testing The Opposition At The Ballot

The Emergence Of John Fru Ndi

Conclusion New Political Contract

Bibliography

DEDICATION

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This work is dedicated to Cameroonian nationalists of the past, present, and the future. For those who aspired to leadership and died in the effort; those who attained leadership and performed as best they could, given the daunting circumstances of their times; and for those who will rise to leadership and improve on the work of their predecessors.

MILESTONES OF CAMEROON’S POLITICAL HISTORY

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SELECTED POLITICAL PARTIES AND GROUPS SINCE 1990

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GOVERNMENT LEADERS SINCE 1954

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Deceased

Andre Marie Mbida, 1917-1980

Augustine Ngom Jua, 1924-1977

Ahmadou Ahidjo, 1924-1989

Emmanuel Mbella Lifate Endeley, 1916-1998

Simon Pierre Tchoungi, 1907-1997

John Ngu Foncha, 1916-1999

CharlesAssale, 1907-1990

Solomon Tandeng Muna, 1912-2002

PREFACE

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C ameroun was conceived in 1947 at the Unicafra Congress that met in Douala, which brought together in one location all the aspiring political figures in the United Nations Trust Territory of French Cameroun. Disagreement among participants of the Congress caused a rupture that constituted the first trauma suffered by the territory in its fetal stage of becoming a country. It produced two mutually hostile camps: the nationalists and the collaborators. From this pre-birth trauma sprung the radical nationalist Racam ( Rassemblement Camerounais ) that declared itself the Cameroun government in embryo. Shocked by thi effrontery the French colonial state immediately banned Racam. From the ruins of Racam emerged the fledgling nationalist Union des Populations du Cameroon (U.P.C.), founded in 1948 with a dual program of achieving independence and unification of the two Cameroons on the terms of the indigenes and not the foreign interlopers who were exploiting the resources of Cameroun for the interest of Fr ance.

By its principled stance and refusal to compromise, the U.P.C. placed itself at variance with France and from its inception to its demise the party was marked by French colonialism for destruction. Thus, with Ruben Um Nyobe representing the U.P.C. as interlocutor, he positioned himself as the mortgagor of Cameroon. France could not have Cameroon by purchase or subterfuge unless Um Nyobe, on behalf of the U.P.C., consented to the offer. But Um Nyobe was a man of conviction who could not be bought and failure after several attempts to negotiate with the mortgagor forced France to eliminate him. The assassination of Um Nyobe in 1958 constituted the second pre-birth trauma of the Cameroon body politic.

Meanwhie, the year 1958 saw the unfolding of a third trauma of the Cameroon body politic in British Southern Cameroons. It was something of a political earth quake staged in the rolling hills and valleys of the Bamenda Grassfields in Kom, and its result was the 1959 electoral victory of John Ngu Foncha’s Kamerun National Democratic Party (K.N.D.P.) over Emmanuel M.L. Endeley’s Cameroon People’s National Congress (C.P.N.C.). Back in French Cameroun during that same year the vexing question focused on how to deal with the uncompromising Um Nyobe. This question caused a rupture of traumatic proportions between the French colonial state and their first hand-picked prime minister, André-Marie Mbida. Because Mbida had probably refused to grant France the authority to eliminate Um Nyobe, his removal was orchestrated in 1958, which paved the way for a more compliant collaborator, Ahmadou Ahidjo, to become prime minister. Ahidjo willingly granted his French colonial masters the authority they sought to assassinate Um Nyobe and to deliver a deathblow to the nationalist U.P.C.

The rise of Ahidjo in French Cameroun in 1958—replacing Mbida as prime minister—and that of Foncha in British Southern Cameroons in 1959 where he, too, replaced Endeley as prime minister, were traumatic in the sense that both inaugurated monumental power shifts in the two Cameroons that have since reunification in 1961 influenced and shaped the contours of power relations in the Cameroon body politic.¹ Indeed, Ahidjo and Foncha would emerge as the principal architects of the Cameroon federation. But in 1970 another trauma shook the Cameroon body politic when Ahidjo dropped Foncha for Solomon Tandeng Muna as his vice president. This event underscored the fact that in domestic as well as international politics statesmen and nations have no permanent allies. Every person, and everything, is expendable and subject to the calculations of personal or national interests. Foncha had served his usefulness to Ahidjo.

Cameroon’s United Republic era was disquietingly calm. Ahidjo had successfully reduced every citizen and social institution to the service of his will. Every adult citizen was a member of his Cameroon National Union (C.N.U.) political party and Ahidjo was their chairman, president, and father. Then, in 1982, Ahidjo suddenly resigned the presidency peacefully and announced Prime Minister Paul Biya as his successor. But because he entertained hopes of continuing to govern from his position as chairman of the C.N.U., he fell out with President Biya. The political schism between the former and new presidents caused a serious trauma that involved an attempted coup détat, which almost rent apart the Cameroon body politic. After the foiling of the coup Cameroon returned to normalcy until the last trauma of the 1990s—which consisted of the struggle for multipartyism and Operation Ghost Town, both of which were somewhat connected to the most enduring trauma in Cameroon’s history known as the Anglophone Problem.

Cameroon’s political traumas are cast within the context of four broad themes that have dominated the political history of modern Cameroon since the late 1940s. These themes are unification, ethnicity, the struggle for democracy, and the Anglophone Problem. There is an uncanny resemblance between the 1950s struggle for freedom against French colonial oppression in Cameroun and the 1990s struggle for a multiparty political system against the one-party hegemony of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). In both struggles the proponents of change won very limited political concessions from the power structure. Consequently, the promise of unification, the problem of ethnicity, and the incompatible colonial legacies of modern Cameroon that seem to be at the center of the Anglophone Problem are yet to be addressed in any meaningful way let alone resolved. The present study proposes to focus on these themes and more.

Political change in contemporary Cameroon has been persistent but very slow, almost snail-paced, impalpable, yet inexorable. The movement has sometimes given the impression that Adam Smith’s mysterious invisible hand was at work in Cameroon propelling change even as things seem to standstill. If political transformation in Cameroon has been relentless but imperceptible, what accounts for this apparent discrepancy in change that is not felt or experienced by many? What has been the nature of this slow pace of political change in Cameroon? Who have been the primary actors directing, or being directed by, the transforming agency whose change many members of the restless political class is yet to experience? How have these political actors played their roles? And why is the country where it is today, mired in what appears to some as retrogression? This critical interpretive historical analysis is designed to accomplish one thing: to agitate Cameroonians to question and rethink the direction in which their country is gravitating. To that end, the contemporary political history of Cameroon dating from the late-1940s to the early-1990s will be analyzed with the intention of explicating some of the rather perplexing events that have characterized this trying period of Cameroon’s political history.

Given the fact that my life and the lives of many in my generation are tightly intertwined with the political history of Cameroon, I can hardly aspire to separate our ambitions and aspirations from the trajectory of that history. We constitute the neglected generation that might never have the opportunity to govern Cameroon. Many of us were born in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Ahmadou Ahidjo rose to power and was executing his master plan to lord over Cameroon. We were born into a police state in which fear ruled the lives of many an adult. In that state neighbors did not trust their neighbors; neither political freedom nor freedom of expression existed. All the legendary nationalist political leaders whose names our parents apprehensively whispered in silence had been co-opted, silenced to insignificance, exterminated, or exiled. The last of these who dared to show his face in Ahidjo’s Cameroon, Ernest Ouandie, was executed in Bafoussam in January 1971. Born into fear, nourished by fear in a country where terror reigned supreme, the power of conviction that galvanizes resistance in human beings was sapped out of our beings long before we attained adulthood. We grew up to be cowards, having learned that survival in silence was the only viable response to a regime that destroyed life. The great ones had all died for the cause of freedom. We opted to live in servitude and servitude became our harvest.

Personally, I learned an instructive lesson that has guided my actions throughout my life: to never blame political leaders for my personal frailties. The fact is that our inherent weaknesses are responsible for our oppression. I also learned what seems to have eluded many: that it is people who make up various social groupings. The collectivity of these social groupings, call them tribes or ethnic groups, make up the Cameroon nation. Without people there would be no national entity known as Cameroon, no political leaders, and no government. In the final analysis, the political history of modern Cameroon is a history of the disjuncture between the people and their government, of how the people and their leaders have been disconnected in the process of nation-building. There is no symbiotic relationship between the leaders and led. The former lead with impunity and the latter follow sheepishly. Unless the people demand and act on their demands, the political leaders (government) will not respond. Hence the burden of national construction rests not so much with the political leaders but with the people. The people can only get the government they deserve.

Growing up in Cameroon many of my generation loved the land of our birth and entertained great dreams for the future. Cameroon was a Land of Promise, real promise, and not just as the Cameroon national anthem proclaimed but also from what our inexperienced eyes could discern and our unsophisticated minds muster. There was hope, or what seemed to us as such, everywhere. Everywhere we looked we could see nothing but a promising future. Expectantly, we looked forward to the end of President Ahmadou Ahidjo’s despotism, since everything with a beginning ultimately has an end. We had hoped that a new post-Ahidjo era would be different. Not gifted with the ability to read the future, little did we know that barely a decade after Ahidjo our beloved Fatherland would plunge into an abyss…. Not long after Ahidjo’s departure, it appeared as if Cameroon was sinking. As if caught by the spell of an evildoer, tragedy struck, and our hopes and aspirations were not only dashed, but our dreams were also violently deferred! Yes, our inheritance was violated and our Fatherland, at one time prosperous, was reduced to destitution. It now appears that our generation is doomed by the actions (or inaction), incompetence, and selfishness of those who came before us. Why? What happened? This monograph attempts to trace and explain the origins and manifestations of the tragedies that befell Cameroon at different points of her history, and particularly at the moment when some of us were just about to attain maturity and, with great expectations, looked forward to eventually replacing our predecessors so that we may also shoulder the responsibility of national construction.

I write from the perspective of a nationalist, of one who loves his native country and wishes to see it prosper as a cohesive, single, integrated entity catering to the needs of its people. Therefore, I have undertaken this task of chronicling the history of Cameroon from the 1940s to the 1990s with uncharacteristic candor, guided only by the data at my disposal and the intellectual prowess of analysis, synthesis, interpretation, and explanation. It has never been lost to me, and I believe, to many of my generation, that every generation has its leaders; that no single generation of leaders should lay claim to a nation for much longer than is necessary. For, whenever political leaders overstay their welcome to power and the burning desire to foster development dies with their longevity at the hem of state, they often tend to settle down comfortably to pillaging and plundering the resources of state. Rather than see themselves as custodians of the wealth of the nation, leaders who stay too long in power begin to view the state as their personal property. And from that vantage point they misconstrue their roles. Rather then see themselves as servants of the people, they begin to think that they are some kind of gods who own the country and its wealth, and that their every whim is a law of the land. The fate of Ahmadou Ahidjo is illustrative of this delusion. But, as it is the responsibility of the generation before to devolve political power in a timely fashion to the generation after, so too it is the responsibility of the after generation to make the before generation that preceded it feel very uncomfortable prolonging its stay in power. In Cameroon, we, the after generation have not been forthcoming. We have failed our beloved native land.

From about 1987, almost everywhere and in every direction, front and back, left and right, a great and invisible wall was raised in Cameroon. That wall blocked not so much our view as it did our access to those instruments of state with which to transform the Land of Promise into a social reality for every Cameroonian. The fate of my generation was sealed, not by our own actions but by historical circumstances beyond our control that validated Karl Marx’s prophetic pronouncement of 1852: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.² Indeed, we make our own history under influences transmitted from the past. But those influences limit our ability to overcome constraints because we either do not know how or we are unwilling to learn how.

And so I set out in this work to investigate whether the tragedy that befell Cameroon in 1987 was transmitted from the past; whether it is because Cameroonians, especially my generation, could not commit themselves to work for the public good; or whether traces of past influences and non-commitment combined to engender and prolong this tragedy. Such is the task that I have set for myself in Cameroon: Traumas of the Body Politic. The contents of this book began as research for a professional conference paper in 1991, which was presented at the 35th Annual Conference of the African Studies Association (ASA) that met in St. Louis, Missouri in November of that year. More than two decades after that initial presentation, new material has been added to the original paper but the analysis,