David Defeats Goliath

By Dr. David Makongo

DAVID DEFEATS GOLIATH is a proverbial walk down the mountains and valleys of our lives. It is filled with wise counsel from across generations and different sages. It is predicated on the fact that one man with the right mind frame can win epic battles. Using his o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. David Makongo
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805413875

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DAVID DEFEATS GOLIATH

DAVID DEFEATS GOLIATH

Short Essays, Insights, and Thoughts on Creating Your Destiny, Making a Difference and Leaving a Legacy.

Dr. David Makongo

Copyright © 2023 by Dr. David Makongo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

ISBNs:

978-1-80541-386-8 (Paperback)

978-1-80541-387-5 (eBook)

978-1-80541-388-2 (Hardcover)

Contents

Preface

Introductory Note: A Point of No Return

Taming Our Fear

Broken but Not Conquered

The Rupture: Turning a New Page!

Our Weapons of Battle

Focus: Riding On a Sure Tide

Taking Full Responsibility

What Drives You?

Our Hospitality, Our Secret Strength

The Power of Truth

There is Always a Bright Side of things

The Perils of Following the Crowd

The Power of Intention — Making a Difference

Self-Image: Grooming Your Spaces of Encounter

Understanding What Limits You

You Are Not a Victim

Using Daily Rituals to Transform Your Life

The Power of Habit

Beating Obstacles to Change

Speaking Kindly to Yourself

Driving Your Life with Intention

Enhance Your Creativity

Connect Your Thoughts to Your Purpose

Being in the Context

The Bright Side of Pain

Find a Reason for Whatever You Do

Guilt is an Old Enemy

Anger and Hatred Destroy You

Values Define Us

Re-defining Your Purpose

Get in Touch with Your Weakness

Take Advantage of What Nurtures You

Grownups Don’t Whine

The Quest for Inner Freedom

Getting Comfortable with Yourself

The Healing journey

Have the Courage to Grow

Secret to Making the Change that Matters

Personal Growth: An Inevitable Call

Facing Fear — Our Most Intrimate Stranger

And Stop Chasing Happiness

Two Damaging Illusions About Success and Happiness

The Power of Our Connections

Ask Why, Not How, Not What!

Practice Gratitude

Examine the Way You Think

How to Make your Thoughts Real

Don’t Dwell on Your Mistakes; Learn from Them!

Preface

DAVID DEFEATS GOLIATH is a proverbial walk down the mountains and valleys of our lives. It is filled with wise counsel from across generations and from different sages. It is predicated on the fact that one man with the right mind frame can win epic battles. Using his own life, while growing up in rural Southern Cameroons, Dr. David Makongo captures the moods of the young folks fighting oppression back home, and with snippets, boosts the waning morale of his Ambazonian brethren, who, in their vast majority, are asking questions whether the path to freedom they took is tenable.

Light is right, and wherever it beams, it brings its light and might to the subjects under discourse so naturally. This short book, packed with timeless wisdom, in simple and easy-to-understand language, is a survivors’ companion as they take a long walk through a savage wilderness where only the fittest survive. Survival becomes child’s play, as everyone is summoned through this book to bring out the light of David in them, in order to defeat the remote vestiges of brute force and towering shadows of fear within. The defeat of biblical GOLIATH is the turning point in overpowering oppressive negative circumstances and people.

Broken into forty-eight chapters, readers can pause at the end of each of the chapters for specific reference and return at will to refer to other subjects as varied as Taming our Fear; A Point of no Return; Broken but not Conquered; The Power of Truth; Hospitality, etc. Indeed, this is a book you can choose to read from beginning to end or pick on any subject at random and become empowered by the content therein. As the title suggests, the epic battle in the Bible between David and Goliath compels us not to focus on our obstacles and the mountain of troubles standing on our path to success, but, like David in front of the man-mountain and giant Goliath, we should focus on achieving set tasks in order to attain set goals and the glory that ensues from them.

DAVID DEFEATS GOLIATH is, therefore, a refreshing and scintillating companion that has the power to propel the oppressed with newfound spiritual energy to emerge as victors from all difficult challenges. It uses the Ambazonia struggle for self-determination as a case study and a springboard to teach resilience and a purpose-driven people compelled by conviction and a willpower that beats and astonishes bystanders.

CFA & NDA

The world breaks everyone and afterward many become strong at the broken places but those who will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

— Ernest Hemingway

"O, let my land be a land where liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe."

— Langston Hughes

1

Introductory Note: A Point of No Return

What makes a slave? What is it that transforms the human being to the point where he convinces himself that he belongs to someone and that his place is on the scaffold? What is it that drives people to a point where they commit despicable acts against their fellow human beings? What actually drives some people into taking others captive and making them go through despicable pain? How long can this last? What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose paradise? What is our lifespan on earth? Is it worthwhile committing all these atrocious crimes only to end up in the grave anyway? Do we really care about the aftermath of this life? These are questions that haunted me from a very tender age, long before I could even understand what slavery and injustice meant. There were times, while I walked the muddy paths, or the dusty roads of my homeland, barefooted, returning from school, that I’d wonder about the subject of the inequality of equal men. The more I looked at my people — the peasant folk of what once was called Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia), the young men and women leaving school and feeling as though they were trapped in a prison in their own homeland, people growing old and feeling as though they never lived, people dying of hunger in the midst of abundance — the more the question begs for an answer.

I felt it most fitting to open this book with a quick visit to the journey of my people, highlighting the psychology of the beast that has controlled and deprived the Ambazonians of their fundamental rights to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness for over fifty years.

We are in the 60s, a period of decolonization in Africa.

After we had been under the trusteeship of Britain since the defeat of Germany in WWI, our people clamored for independence. Yes, we got our independence on 1st October 1961, a year after the independence of the neo-colonial French Cameroun. Our woes began in the same year when the UN asked us to choose between joining Nigeria or Cameroun. The choice to join Cameroun was made under circumstances that can be classified as shady and fraught with deceit, to say the least. During the Mamfe Conference of 1959, the representatives of the people requested that the UN present only two questions to decide the future of its people: Do you wish to remain with Nigeria, or do you wish to form an independent state?

The French lobbied for Southern Cameroons to form a union with La République du Cameroun because she had already signed neo-colonial pacts with Cameroun to tap into her resources. La République du Cameroun was a country already sold to France before independence, thus France wanted to expand her control over the territory into Ambazonia. France was vying for the immense wealth of this burgeoning nation. Thus, when our forebears reluctantly went into the federation, they never knew that they were unwittingly subjugating their people to the worst form of neo-colonial rule. The Southern Cameroons comprised a people with a unique identity, culture and history, who had operated as a quasi-independent state since 1954, lived with ease and in peace, and had a growing economy, as evidenced by the September 1954 financial report submitted to the United Nations.

Despite this, we were coerced into a partnership that was designed to rob us of everything. This happened pretty quickly. French Cameroun got her independence in 1960 but we were never part of it. We got ours in 1961 yet they lured us into a partnership that turned sour. Then they absorbed us and soon turned us into slaves in our own land. They invaded our land, transferred every project that was designed to improve the livelihoods of our people to their cities in Yaoundé and Douala, and for the past fifty-seven years, they have bled us dry.

It wasn’t long before we learned that we had no voice in the so-called federation, which was quickly and hastily transformed into a unitary state by President Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroun. The present tyrant, President Paul Biya, changed the name of the country and reverted to the name which Cameroun had at independence, thus symbolically erasing Southern Cameroons from the picture in order to make her records straight in the Secretariat of the UN and AU. Unfortunately, the map they used to gain membership of the UN and AU has not changed since 1960 because there is no treaty of union between the two states of French Cameroun and Southern Cameroons. Before the war of self-determination broke out in 2017 and interrupted their work, la République du Cameroun was fighting with Nigeria in what is called the Cameroun-Nigeria Boundary Commission to redraw the maps of both countries and give Cameroun and Nigeria a maritime boundary which they never had before then because Southern Cameroons remained missing from the 1st of January 1960 map which had been frozen on the date when la République du Cameroun got independence, as per the Constitutive Act of the AU.

What happened after the rise of dictator Paul Biya to power has been a history of systemic assimilation of the people of Southern Cameroons. Through his work, our cultural heritage has been viciously attacked, our educational system relegated to an obscure corner, and our system of law cunningly replaced with the theatrics in French courts. Many voices have risen over the decades to denounce the injustices to which the Ambazonians have been subjected, but each time the people spoke, they got slammed down in the most vicious ways. The ­colonization and enslavement of the people of ­Ambazonia were designed to happen through phases — well-calculated phases.

First, they were treated as second-class citizens. Basic amenities, such as roads, medical facilities, electricity, and water — even in those places where the occupier tapped the richest resources — were, and still are, lacking. Our people had to begin to travel to Francophone cities for the services they required as well as documents — passport, retirement benefits, salaries, education, and a lot more. Second, they made us learn how to speak French, the colonial language, in order to have access to their educational system, markets and jobs. It isn’t surprising that the courts and the schools were gradually handed over to Francophones. The third phase has been characterized by the systematic dehumanization of our people. This phase was intended to make our people lose self-confidence and come to a point of apathy, where they believe that nothing can change the status quo; a point where they will have to see their life as a favour and show of kindness from the occupier.

The slaver wants you to believe that they have what you do not have. This will consequently put you into an enviable situation, in which he will literally take control of you. The slavers believe that they know what is best for you. They will try to negotiate with you on their own terms and, once you claim your right to think for yourself, they’ll find ways to shut you up. For instance, how many Ambazonians have been killed or jailed unjustly over the years, some of whom have been dying in dingy prisons, just for speaking out against the injustice and abuse? Furthermore, they will make you feel as though your life depended on them, while they suck on you like bed bugs.

Another tool that the occupier has successfully used against most of our people to keep them bound to their apron strings, and in which he has succeeded for far too long, has been fear. They believe that by killing our people, by raping our women and jailing our people, they will make us fear them. Thus, they continue to intimidate us. They kill us. They imprison us. And they bring all kinds of suffering upon us. They want us on our knees, deprived of everything, until, out of necessity, despair and the need for survival, we will cave in and start accepting the crumbs that fall from their tables. The inhuman treatment we have suffered over the years has been backed by the slave master, France, who has been using la République du Cameroun to indirectly rob us of oil, gas and other resources.

But this book isn’t about the suffering of our people.

It is about the rise of the phoenix from the ashes.

It is about the freedom of