NW/SW Issues, Pro-regime Elite & the Anglophone Nation

Northwest peoples have genuine issues to iron out with Southwest peoples - genuine grievances. Southwest peoples have genuine grievances to iron out with Northwest peoples. Those are nothing to do with hate. They are about good fences that make good neighbours or clear terms that keep siblings mutually at ease.

Pretending there are no problems when hate bursts out so often from either side is hypocrisy. Meanwhile, primitive tribalists posing as the enlightened (one-eyed men in the country of the blind) because of the shameful absence of enlightenment where langa throat and parvenuism and arrivism have taken hold of society, are seeking to secure the interests of one peoples against/over the other. They perpetrate parochial utterances and actions that shame them in the eyes of those fooled to admire them.

The views of elite of either Anglophone regions cannot be considered the views of either region. Our so-called elites - the vocal ones - are essentially ruling party political elites. If their opinion mattered, the youth won't have protested with the massive support of the population, taken up arms in self-defence and brought the country to its knees, amid the denial of the so-called elites.

It is wrong to think that only English language binds the Northwest and Southwest regions. British mandate/trusteeship authority might have been what brought grassland and forest/coastal peoples together but across history and different places around the world, there is always the pull or push factor that sets the stage for the emergence of a nation. What makes or unmakes a nation are their experiences together.

Northwest and Southwest peoples may have contrasting native cultural backgrounds and attitudes yet, amid the cleavages, NW-SW have become a nation. Attributes of a nation (different from those of a state or country) include people(s) with a common history, common challenges, common aspirations, common joys, common victories, common fears, common suffering, common defeats, common language, common quest for redemption, common... common...

They must not always be absolute. The majority of the "common" are common to the Northwest and Southwest. Northwest peoples may have grassland brothers elsewhere as Southwest peoples may have forest/coastal kin elsewhere. Having blended and bonded over the last 100+ years since the British took control of their territory from Germany during WW1, they have become a people (nation) recognized internationally, eg, the 2005 ruling of the AFRICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN and PEOPLES RIGHTS in BANJUL, the GAMBIA.

Do not be misled, nationhood is less ethnic; it is more socio-political. Whatever claims Northwest peoples may have of their ethnic affinities to grassland peoples elsewhere, whatever ethnic affinities Southwest peoples may have with forest/coastal peoples elsewhere, it is the shared Anglosaxon values and the common frustrations suffered by peoples of Northwest and Southwest origin in a so-called (re)unified Cameroon and their common quest for redemption that define the identity and sense of belonging of the Anglophone/Southern Cameroonian. Anything to the contrary is the fruit of political manipulation and blindfolding.

On a TV debate over Vision4's CLUB d'ELITES in 2018 with Hon. Joshua Osih, the venerated History professor Daniel Abwa, the young professor Leka Essomba and one other panelist I can't recall, Abwa brought up his sing-song "Ni Anglophones, Ni Francophones, Tous Camerounais" and when he took the line that Anglophone Mbo and Francophone Mbo cannot/should not be separated by European languages, I challenged him to go seize and bring "home" the Fang in Equatorial Guinea and maybe Gabon separated from their Fang kin in Cameroon. I repeat: nationhood is not necessarily ethnic-based; it is socio-politically-based.

Unfortunately, the cracks on the Anglophone/Southern Cameroonian wall are the making of greedy petty, amateur warlords who propagate tribal, regional hegemony as if the aim of this genuine, justified struggle is to give an upper hand to one group over the other. As I have said elsewhere before, that is being pennywise and pound-foolish. Such bad seeds are the ones eroding the fabric of the indisputable Anglophone/Southern Cameroonian nation. And that is a serious problem.

*The author, a freelance investigative journalist, editor, columnist and editorial writer, is an Alfred Friendly Press Partners (US) fellow. He can be reached at: DIRECT CALLS: +237 677897167, WHATSAPP: 656969090