A Legitimate Call for Separate Government

Abstract

Two separate notions on who is an Anglophone have been gathering attention and shaping up against one another since the onset of political unrest in the North-West and South-West administrative regions of the Republic of Cameroon. The first and prevailing notion, especially outside of the country, is that Anglophones are English-speakers of the country’s English-speaking area corresponding to the former British Southern Cameroons. In the background of this notion is the assumption that Anglophones are the bulk of Cameroonians, wherever they are, who have been presumably educated in English and have thus become, more or less, the bearers of English language and British culture. Common law and the British-inspired educational curriculum have been epitomized by the demonstrations of lawyers and teachers as the expression of that culture and its resilient façade in the country’s political institutions. The provocative status that our first notion of Anglophone confers to English language and British culture in an African country, which as Achille Mbembe wrote might make some laugh, cannot be taken seriously unless both the administration of justice and the provision of minimal genuine education are examined within the context of the struggle of the people of the former British Southern Cameroons to resist attempts by the central government of Cameroon to undermine any institutional difference with the former French Cameroun, in the name of harmonization, while upholding its institutional borrowings and channels with the Republic of France through sustained and ceaselessly renewed cooperation and ever more bolstered technical assistance.The second notion is a peculiar one. For ordinary Cameroonians, an Anglophone is he or she who is native to the two regions of the North-West and South-West. However, the peculiarity of this notion comes with the idea that being a native of the region, or of any place in the country for that matter, has neither to do with being born there nor being able to speak the putative language of the place. It all has to do with being able to trace and materialize one’s patrilineal descent to the place back to colonial era. In that sense, an Anglophone may not necessarily be someone born or domiciled in former British Southern Cameroons – but these facts will not diminish an iota of their ‘Anglophoneness’. Their genealogy bears testimony to their birth right as Anglophones. There have been accusations of deceit regarding people’s supposedly real origin at times of dissension on tactics, especially when it related to enforcing ghost towns or boycotting schools.

Keywords: Anglophones, Cameroon, British Southern Cameroons, Africa, postcolonial, state-building, nation-building, secession, independence, political identity, citizenship, ethnicity, French colony, German colony, colonialism