Sometimes
in March, 2007 I went to the Service of Lands in Bamenda to register a
piece of property I had just acquired. The technician I met in the
office that Monday morning told me the registration will cost 157, 000
FRS CFA, which I promptly paid. Curiously when he brought my receipt I
discovered that only the sum of 90,000 FRS had been receipted for. When I
asked to know what had become of the outstanding 67,000 FRS, he gave me
a long convoluted explanation of some unofficial charges connected with
the transaction which I obviously did not understand. Because I was in
no mood for a fight that early on a Monday morning, I let the matter
drop but insisted the job had to be done immediately. While we were in
the car going to inspect the property, the technician – a gentleman of
Aghem extraction – delved into a long tirade on how the francophones,
especially the Betis, have destroyed Cameroon with what he called their
“chop-broke-pottism” . At
that point I politely drew his attention
to the fact that he and his colleagues had just ripped 67, 000FRS off me
and I didn’t recall seeing any francophone or any Beti native around
that office.
This technician’s attitude in a way is indicative
of the false sense of righteousness that now animates Cameroon’s
Anglophone community. Once considered as the nation’s moral compasses
because of our unique character, we the Anglophones have over the years
become as warped up as our francophone brothers have always been reputed
to be. And today, many are those who claim, not without a taint of
cynicism perhaps, that the so-called Anglophone Character is an
over-worked myth.
But it has not always been like that.
There
once was a distinct Anglophone character. It articulated itself in the
decency and pragmatism with which we handled the
great issues of the day like politics, education, the administration of
justice, the conduct of public meetings, journalism, the management of
public affairs, to name but a few.
The Anglophone Character found
expression in the way we did politics. The Fonchas and the Endeleys
might have been staunch political opponents but they had the utmost
respect for each other. During elections they drove to the same campaign
events in the same convoy and shared the same platform. And after a
long tiring day of campaigning they would meet at the club in the
evening and share drinks and jokes. In later times this character has
been typified in the boldness of men like Albert Mukong and Ni John Fru
Ndi.
The Anglophone Character saw its relevance in the our
educational system, which was child-centered, skills-based and
morally-oriented; a system in which students were challenged at an early
age to be analytical and independent in their thinking and not just
repeat what they were taught.
Our judicial system was the very
epitome of the Anglophone Character, with its emphasis on the
independence of judges and the rule of law, the dignity and solemnity of
court sessions, a well organized private bar and a criminal code that
espoused the presumption of innocence.
The way we conducted public
meetings and debates in our deliberative assemblies are unique
expressions of the Anglophone Character: Mr. Chairman Sir, Call to
Order, Vote of No-confidence, motions tabled, seconded and supported;
the famous 11-point agenda, the 11th item always being “Refreshments” .
The
Anglophone Character found added meaning in our brand of journalism:
investigative, bold, unapologetic, void of sycophancy; a tool for
holding public leaders accountable; exemplified in men like Tataw
Obenson (aka Ako-Aya) Sam Nuvalla Fonkem, Charly Ndichia, Ntemfag Ofege,
Zachary Nkuo, Jerry J.K Dohmatob and showcased in programs like
“Cameroon Report” and “Minute by Minute”.
Blue-blooded Anglophones
like Pa Jomia Pefok brought the Anglophone Character to bear on the
management of public affairs: rigor, the seriousness of purpose, a high
sense of moral probity, transparency and public accountability.
Yes.
These are just some aspects of the Anglophone Character that have
informed and shaped in an irreversible manner the process of
nation-building in Cameroon. Even though our Francophone brothers have
never publicly admitted it, inwardly they know that Anglophones have
developed systems far superior and far enduring than what the French
bequeathed to them; systems which they are obviously benefiting from
while also conspiring to destroy.
The facts speak for themselves. Consider the following:
According
to statistics gathered from some 5 missionary secondary schools in the
Bamenda metro area, about 50% of the children enrolled during the
2005-2006 academic year
were Francophones whose parents reside outside the Anglophone provinces
(mostly Douala and Yaoundé). And yet there is no evidence whatsoever
that Anglophone parents residing outside the Francophone provinces are
sending their kids to Francophone secondary schools. This pattern is
also noticeable in the PNEUs, the private nursing schools in and around
Bamenda town, and most intriguingly, at the St. Thomas Aquinas Major
Seminary, Bambui.
And talking about the church, successive popes
from Paul VI to John Paul II have always felt comfortable appointing
Anglophone Bishops (like Cardinal Tumi and Bishop Immanuel Bushu) to
serve in francophone dioceses and yet since the founding of the Church
in Cameroon, no francophone Bishop has ever been appointed to serve in
the Anglophone zone.
Almost all the top-notch lawyers in Douala and
Yaoundé are Anglophones, and yet 50 years after independence not even
one Francophone lawyer has been courageous enough to
set up chambers in the any of the Anglophone cities. And the reason is
simple: Francophone lawyers just can’t deal with the rigors of the
Anglo-Saxon court system.
It is our way of life, our core values as a
socio-cultural and linguistic minority that have defined and set us
apart as a different group of Cameroonians altogether. But strange
enough, over the years we have watched unabashed as those values
deteriorated, mainly through a systematic absorption into a so-called
larger culture but also by our own complacency and connivance.
I
knew all wasn’t morally well in Anglophone Cameroon one evening in June
1987. I had been jogging behind a primary school in Bamenda on a day
that happened to be the eve of the writing of the First School Leaving
Certificate Examination. The class seven pupils were having their last
revision session. Or so I thought… Interested to see how revision
sessions those days looked like as compared to what they were
in my own days, I went closer to watch. To my utter shock and chagrin, I
found a team of 4 teachers coaching and literally drilling the pupils
on how to cheat during an examination! The years following would be
marked by allegations of leakages and sale of official examination
papers in the streets of Anglophone Cameroon, sometimes by those who
were charged with their protection. In the Department of English of the
then University of Yaoundé, often touted as the last frontier of the
purity of Anglophone higher education, cheating (once a taboo
in the
department) had also become common place. It was like our entire moral
fabric was collapsing all around us like a pack of cards in a child’s
hands and we weren’t even noticing!
In politics, like in the
management of public affairs, the legendary “gentlemanly” conduct that
Anglophone politicians and public managers were generally associated
with had given way to the corruption, ineptitude,
back-stabbing and blackmail that are hallmarks of public stewardship in
French Cameroon. During the 10 odd years I spent in the Cameroonian
Civil Service I learnt 2 critical lessons the hard way: first, that the
greatest enemy of the Anglophone is his fellow Anglophone; and second,
that if perchance you come across a fellow Anglophone with unbridled
political ambitions, or one who has his sights resolutely set on a top
position, do well to step out of his way. I can’t even begin to narrate
here the kind of things I witnessed some Anglophones do to each other
all in a bid to gain favor with the Francophone governing establishment.
There is no modicum of doubt that there has been a conscious
attempt to annihilate the Anglophone way of life in a francophone
dominated Cameroon. Glaring evidence abounds in the so-called
integration policies that have sought to alter or bring under
francophone control our education and court systems as well as repeated
attempts to seize the Credit Union, one of the nation’s most
sustainable micro-credit schemes.
Even when it has been proven
beyond reasonable doubts that some aspects of the Anglophone way of life
are beneficial to the country, such proofs are either treated with
scorn or simply ignored. For instance, when in the 1980s the Zambou
Commission established that the one-shift work system practiced in the
Anglophone regions was more productive than the two-shift system
practiced in the Francophone zone and recommended the nation-wide
implementation of the one-shift system, the then Minister of the Public
Service and Administrative Reform, Prof. Joseph Owona, resisted its
implementation on the ridiculous excuse that it will be prejudicial to
taxi-drivers! Given the fervor with which the Minister argued his case,
you might have thought he was the President of the Taxi drivers Union,
not a government minister whose responsibilities included ensuring
productivity in the public service. And who in Cameroon doesn’t know
that it’s a good thing for public
elementary school kids to wear
uniforms? It’s cheaper for parents, and enforces cleanliness and
discipline in the kids. Yet no one has ever given it serious thought
simply because it’s a purely Anglophone practice.
So is the
Anglophone character a reality or simply a far-fetched myth nurtured and
sustained in the imagination of nostalgic Anglophones, as some cynics
will make us believe? Without doubt the Anglophone character is real and
alive. But it behooves of us as Anglophones to reclaim and reassert its
ownership and take steps to project it. Constantly blaming the
francophones for the moral breakdown in our community, while engaging in
behavior antithetical to our known values, is being plain pretentious.
We have to own up to our own failures as a community and take steps to
showcase our unique character both at home and abroad. And
we must do so affirmatively, passionately and decisively.
I have
never understood why Anglophones will go to a cabaret in the middle of
Maryland-USA and are struggling to place their orders and pay their
bills in French, simply because all the waiters happen to be
French-speaking! And have you ever noticed how whenever there are, say,
six Cameroonians in a room, only one of whom is a francophone, somehow
all the five Anglophones will be struggling to speak in French, just to
please him? I don’t know what to make of this kind of attitude except to
infer that it smacks of some sort of an inferiority complex.
Whether
we like it or not, the re-affirmation of our “Anglophoness” , the
reconstruction of the Anglophone identity so to speak, is a
responsibility that we must assume with fierce urgency, that is, if we
still hope to survive as a distinctive socio-cultural and linguistic
entity in a rapidly decaying Cameroonian social order. This
responsibility is first and foremost individual and stretches far
beyond the machinations of moribund organizations like the so-called
SCNC. And speaking of the myriad of organizations out there claiming to
be fighting for an independent Anglophone state, I have often wondered
what purpose such a state will serve if it is bereft of its true
character, of its soul, of its unique idiosyncrasies? We can defeat the
myths of the Anglophone Character by re-living its realities.
*The
columnist is a former Civil Administrative officer in Cameroon and
currently Deputy Head of Governance Programs with the United Nations
Mission in Haiti. He holds an MPA (Public Policy Analysis and Strategic
Management) from Harvard University
By Julius Nyamkimah Fondong*
