WHO IS AFRAID OF SELF-DETERMINATION AND INDEPENDENCE?

WHO IS AFRAID OF SELF-DETERMINATION

 AND INDEPENDENCE?

AN OPEN LETTER TO 

HIS EXCELLENCY CHRISTOPHER J. LAMORA,

 AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

TO CAMEROON

By

Fr  Gerald Jumbam Nyuykongmo,

His Excellency, Christopher J. Lamora, 

INTRODUCTION

No one who desires a genuine remedy to the current and scandalous condition of the Southern Cameroons,  can have any other feeling than joy, at hearing from your recent and first public address, that one of your topmost objectives is to engage daringly into the perplexing problem, so that you are able to lay down already, in that stirring appointment speech, basis and conditions under which your country would operate; and so, we are happy to welcome the profitable fact, that, with your personal knowledge of the Cameroons, and your early 1990s' experience of its composition and tendencies, with your firsthand experience of Africa  in Ghana, (Ghana, the vanguard of pan-Africanism and black African modern democracy), we can’t think of anyone better suited to the role of ambassador than you, in the Cameroons. Jubilant are we that from the very onset, you have not allowed yourself - as some are doing - to bask pleasurably in the sunshine of forged, fruitless and feeble solutions to a great historic malaise eating up our two peoples - the British Southern Cameroons, and the Francophone Cameroon Republic.

So, Your Excellency, when I gave thought to writing you, my conscience welcomed the idea with prompt delight; prompt delight because it raised a subject that touched my very core; prompt delight because it is a man of your standing I am addressing; prompt delight because it's about the ambassador of the most acclaimed country in the world. The vast, almost omnipresent and all-powerful America can scare the hell out of many, but to me Gerald, that vastness, that omnipresence, that all-powerfulness draws me to them, gets me excited to have an exchange with men and women of that remarkable country. I am thus grateful to be in contact with you and to share with you, somethings that are urgent to me as an indigene of the Southern Cameroons, somethings that are pertinent to you as a diplomat to that crisis-ridden part of the world.

DISGRACE

Your Excellency, it turns out that no people love their prisons and asylums and that the longing for  a noble life is relevant to all. This universal capability to be excellent is what the Southern Cameroonian is clamoring for. We pray that your first visit to that territory, (if you have not done yet) be for you the first whiff of the stench of cruel colonialism that would help crystallize your thinking about the role of the United States of America you are envisioning to help generate, - an atmosphere of self-determination for our suffering and embattled people. The Cameroon Republic, is politically and spiritually a sewage-disposal tank, virtually a failed state. The proliferation of state terrorism, the ruins, the slaughter, the annihilation, the cruelty against indigenous resistance is a disgrace. So brutal the circumstances, so crushing the attack, so cruel the military occupation of the Southern Cameroons, so brutal the Stone Age barbarism. James Baldwin's words paints a good picture of our relationship with them: “there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket.  Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.”   Because of this unbearable affliction, our people have risen. The situation is so bad to have caused enraged victims invoke their famed metaphysical forces and call on their ancient spiritual powers to come crush the testicles of their oppressors' brute force. Where is our ngumba firepower? Where is our much vaunted kighevshu potency? The young spirited freedom fighters have conquered fear, some embraced guerilla-tactics. They would team up together in George Washington-like freedom fighting spirit and recite some potent wata-na-wata, incantations from antiquity to ready their spirits for the defense of their native land.

Let it not be for an instance supposed, that I allow of the saying, that violence is necessary to achieve liberation. Though I believe that there is a way of winning men and women from greater evils by winking for a time at the less, (particularly when the principle of legitimate self-defense is in play) I hold no brief for people perpetrating violence, because, “the theology of self-determination à la Jerry Jumbam...sees Mahatma Gandhi as the Morning Star.”   Those who do violence to the civilian population are widely anarchists, maniacs, sociopaths and opportunists (sponsored allegedly, clandestinely and strangely by thieving agents from the Cameroon republic and some imposter conspirators among Southern Cameroonians) not to be confused with genuine freedom fighters. They do not represent the peace-loving oppressed people of the Southern Cameroons. My family has been victim to the malice of these marauders. Anyone who extorts and plunders resources from poor civilians in the name of independence, or sets human beings blazing in fire inside homes, is an oppressor and is disreputable in the eyes of a teeming number of us who champion self-determination and independence with a spiritual face.

But from the 11th of February 1961 to our present day, without breathing space, there was to be no liberty, no tranquility, no joy for the Southern Cameroons. It's been an unbroken season of unspeakable affliction, unfathomable massacre and down-grinding subjugation. For a calculated and complete conquest of the Southern Cameroonian, outright war (still raging today) was waged against him some five years ago, and the only way that was found suitable was the occupation of his entire land with military bastards from Yaoundé. And so began the devastation, the unprecedented spoilation and the Diaspora of the British Southern Cameroonian State (a stunning Diaspora you can already see in your own country). For five years now, the Southern Cameroonian is hunted down like a beast throughout the Southern Cameroons; and the flower of his manhood raided to concentration camps, slaughtered, and met with nothing but unrelieved tribulation.

MY INTIMACY WITH LIBERATION

Your Excellency, why has a priest taken the time he could well devote to “spiritual things,” to open a discussion with an ambassador, on an issue that seems far removed from his calling? A special tie, a very personal intimacy with liberation has remained the essence of my connection with the world from so early in infancy that I am not able to remember how this bond came about. This has squared so well with the Christian calling in the discharge of my Baptismal role of prophet, of enlightening the world on and denouncing social domination and oppression, especially when these monsters attack the flock that I share destiny with. The Catholic Church in its most recent and sacred Ecumenical Council teaches that, “she will respond to the deep desires of peoples, showing its final hope, preaching freedom, dignity of conscience and rights, that is just, in God’s plan of salvation.”  As priest, I am therefore first man, and as man, I cannot be indifferent to what concerns man. No Christian should apologize to whoever when he or she, Christ-like, speaks for suffering afflicted humanity.

Furthermore, I come from a social context in which few are gifted with the insights God has endowed me with, and, “I was raised up thanks alone to the sweat and suffering of the people of Southern Cameroons. And as Christ says in the Holy Scriptures, ―To whom much has been given, from him much shall be expected. It is therefore only logical that the people of the Southern Cameroons should expect me to tender an account of the education they gave me.”  I say that my mission as a priest is a spiritual one, and that life on earth is not pure spirit. If the Ineffable God, took human flesh, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, in order to take upon himself the pain and suffering of the physical historical man, is He not saying something to us, - that an absolutely spiritual life, on earth, is mistaken belief?

WE LOVE JOE BIDEN

During the campaign of the recent presidential elections that brought your current President,  Joe Biden to power, one thing endeared me to him, and that, perhaps, was the element that caught the attention of many Americans of African origin and swelled the votes of the American Democratic Party. It was his early stance against the brutal Apartheid regime of South Africa. At a moment where America was indecisive in granting support to Nelson Mandela's ANC to defeat Apartheid in South Africa, he rose up ( I think in the Senate) on one occasion right back in  the 1980s, and spoke words of wisdom for the embattled South African black man. A viral video of this took its rounds during your recent presidential campaigns, and brought tears to my eyes. What is striking here is the particular hour he took that decision - a moment of great need.  Joe Biden has a long and beautiful record of sympathy for freedom fighters around the world, which we expect, should not change; a record of champion of freedom over annexation, champion of democracy over oppression, and voice of disadvantaged peoples all over the world. So when he was elected president, we jubilated knowing we had a friend in the new President of the most powerful country in the world.

 There is but one authority to whom recourse can be had for the destiny of our land — the people. Our people have been in the University of Adversity for so long to know what they want. What they know today, their predecessors went through the same school of agony, - what I mean is that what will constitute the solution to the problem of the Southern Cameroons will be what the universal suffrage of that entity professes , what is held semper et ubique et ab omnibus. The least the good and wise Southern Cameroonian expects from the outcome of a dialogue on this issue is a Referendum. Help us update Biden's America on this.

NO MORE MEDIOCRITY IN AFRICA

It is no exaggerated zeal that prompts me, on the Southern Cameroons' ordeal,  to claim Peter Henry Barlerin your predecessor, as one of the greatest American messengers we have had in this part of the world. Barlerin had a great feel for suffering humanity, and his sharp sense of justice and bravery understood so well the Southern Cameroons' historical question and made him a legend in our parts of the world.

There are those who would try to persuade you that since it's in Sub-Sahara Africa, what your diplomatic efforts should achieve, in the ongoing genocidal war, is  a sort of "pacification of the natives"; and they would quote the great General de Gaulle to bolster a line of argument  laden with so much nonsense. Today, mediocrity is given no quarter, anywhere anymore, in Africa. If I have anything to say on this head, to prominent nations like yours capable of creating an enabling environment for the present Southern Cameroons' crisis to be resolved, it is, that they should do all in their power to see Southern Cameroonians as human beings, real human beings. The attitude in the not so distant past where the challenges of embattled and afflicted peoples in Africa, are handled like fiction workshops, where fine theories are spinned about them in imaginary laboratories,  where for example, new drugs are developed and fed to a bunch of lab guinea pigs, and hoping for a favorable outcome, - this type of attitude must cease.

My not-so-humble opinion is therefore that, next to seeing the Southern Cameroonian as human beings, a large-hearted American ambassador of your caliber should champion the cause of seeing the case of constituted, annexed and oppressed people from the position of the inviolability of the principle of  self-determination and should convince his home government to see the war of independence of the Southern Cameroonian freedom fighter as analogous to the American war of independence. We fitly expect you, in your African mission,  to make a difference; to not look back, to be even more courageous than Barlerin,  to follow in the footsteps of the formidable Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

THE MAGNANIMITY OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

Momentous developments sprung in the 1940s and 1950s, among the continents of the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps one of the noblest men, that ever ran for president, in the United States, in a decisive moment of imperial tyranny, in the 1940s, took a serious and unambiguous stance in the interest of the annexed colonized peoples of the world in Africa and Asia. If there are independent states today in Africa, it is thanks to the magnanimity of this man who successfully convinced the reluctant Winston Churchill that it would be hypocritical to defeat German and Italian tyrannies in Europe and remain colonial tyrants in Africa and Asia. Here is a Statesman you must admire if your heart is quick to appeal to unparalleled diplomacy. He had the flash of inspiration right back in 1941 with the Atlantic Charter that put decolonization of colonial territories in the agenda of postwar objectives and defined the character of Post-World War II as that of Self-determination of annexed peoples in the world. The word was "Trusteeship territories", that were to be eventually granted independence out of the clutches of imperial masters.  The Southern Cameroons was one of these Trusteeship territories recognized by the later newly created United Nations Organization, meriting independence. However, it would be in 1943 that Roosevelt would get a complete conversion of heart. On his January 1943 mission to Casablanca to meet Churchill, Roosevelt passed through Gambia, and the ugly sight of colonial emasculation in Gambia, changed his Casablanca war meeting strategy:

“I must tell Churchill what I found out about his British Gambia today, (Roosevelt is said to have said) "This morning, at about eight-thirty, we drove through Bathurst to the airfield.” (Elliott notes it was here that his father began speaking with “real feeling in his voice.”) “The natives were just getting to work. In rags…glum-looking.…They told us the natives would look happier around noontime, when the sun should have burned off the dew and the chill. I was told the prevailing wages for these men was one and nine. One shilling ninepence. Less than fifty cents.”

“An hour?” Elliott asked.

“A day! Fifty cents a day! Besides which, they’re given a half-cup of rice. Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate. I asked. Life expectancy—you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years. Those people are treated worse than the livestock. Their cattle live longer!” 

The aforementioned conversation and the later workings of Roosevelt’s foreign policy changed the destiny of the African and Asian countries under colonial empires. His foreign policy would provoke the salutary wind of change that would blow in these territories. So when Michael Jackson sings: “But if Roosevelt was livin', he wouldn't let this be, no, no,”  we in the Southern Cameroons chime in agreement, earnestly.

That in this very 2021, the U.S. President Joe Biden and U. K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in their very first  meeting (in Cornwall) sign a document called “New Atlantic Charter”,   reminds us all that the original Atlantic  Charter came to stay, - is a sacred document, a timeless one, a relief to suffering subjugated humanity. The root cause of the Southern Cameroons’ problem goes back thus to those years. Indeed, it is the abiding disregard of Roosevelt's decolonizing mission of the annexed world, in the Atlantic Charter, that the British Southern Cameroons stand at this handicapped, disadvantaged and lamentable position today.

I say again that the Southern Cameroons was a trusteeship territory under the UN (like Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya etc.) that was supposed to have full independence. That independence was "stolen", and the determination of the people to get back that stolen heritage is why they are uncompromising in the direction of self-determination, and have resolved to gain inner tranquility only when victory is achieved, since, 

It is the great object of self-determination to be an adversary to such tranquility, to establish the truth about the human being, to restore the dignity of our human person, to give head-aches to the oppressing bully, and to whistle-blow to the world that we are going to restore our independence come what may. The ratiocinative instinct of freedom fighting, the certitude that liberation is coming, and the strong presentiment of a personal Higher Power that protects the just, is alive. The truth of Southern Cameroons independence soars in its majesty, far above the opinions of cock-and-bull stories.  

When the moment comes (and come it will) for us to seat, with the Republic of Cameroon, at the dialogue table, for appropriate questions to be asked and right interpretations drawn about what happened in those terrible 1940s to 1980s, the wisdom of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Africa will be a great help.

IN AGONY WE GROW STRONG

The Southern Cameroons has for about 50 years now been a site of protracted turbulence, a place where hell is let loose, where cultural and human genocide is alive.  The end of foreign colonialism, therefore, did not mean the end of the Southern Cameroonian's woes; for it yielded place almost immediately to colonialism from a Cain brother.  Cain has striven, might and main, to despoil the Southern Cameroonian on his own territory, of his own territory, striven to keep him down lest he should rise and become an equal. To make this new unspeakable captivity more complete, they decide to imprison his soul, to impart in him, through raillery and artillery the idea that he is genetically worthless and has no right over his territory. Thus, they are able to make him despise himself and cause implacable hate among themselves.

“Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”  Difficulties in a revolution of the magnitude of independence are part of taking the liberation seriously. One of the humiliations the Southern Cameroons' revolution is presently going through is the intestinal divisions and strife their leadership has witnessed. It is scandalous and vicious; it has stretched its tentacles. This is disturbing stuff, but it in any way does not dampen my spirits on the victory of good over evil. Our people know too well, that, it is in agony that we grow strong.  No emancipated movement is immune to strife and scuffle. This is historically true. The great ANC that freed South Africa from the malignant hands of Apartheid had one of their deadly enemies in Mangosuthu Buthelezi's the Inkatha Freedom Party, a movement that was also fighting for the Blackman's liberation. You will remember also, that just about eighty years after the War of Independence, divisions and clashes among the freedom fighters of the American war of independence surfaced in the American bloody civil war. Abraham Lincoln, the then President testifies in the famed Gettysburg speech: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation...now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”  

We experience agonizing times in revolutions for three motives:  to strengthen our resolve, to clarify our convictions, to help us proclaim the core values of our cause.  Indeed, I should be more worried by those who have no obstacles than those who do, for those who have no hard knocks have not yet begun to spell things out.

 At embattled times like these, the use of difficulties is evident, because, in order to prove its sincerity, freedom is assailed by many stumbling blocks. So, the person with difficulties may be agonizing, but he is agonizing to understand more exactly and more entirely. And, just like Usain Bolt or Beyonce would train, practice and perspire to accomplish their craft, so the freedom fighter ( if his convictions are to be profitable) must experience pain and suffering,  must witness dejection and rejection,  must go through the crucible of hate and envy. We emerge purer and stronger when we pass through these things.

Any time our people have been bestialized in concentration camps, bastardized by occupation forces, homes reduced to ashes, fat lies told in media houses about them on the altar of "one and indivisible Cameroon", they have always chanted words of that credo I have as the title of my book, paint them on prayer scrolls, flood the skies in their thousands with bamboo kites and balloons on which those words are engraved: Independence or Nothing!

MENTALITIES MUST CHANGE

Your Excellency, you are the embodiment of courage: the nerve to stand by your convictions, even when some group of people are contrary to somethings you stand by. The nerve to be you! Yea, the audacity to pay heed to conscience and not canons from noxious traditions and love-devouring customs. I salute your courage! Mentalities must change, and the core culture of African peoples - best expressed in the word Ubuntu - has always understood that love of neighbor and acceptance of diversity, is power and not weakness.

It's conceivable today - as a matter of fact, it's inescapable - to promote the rights of LGBT members against assault, intolerance and constitutional prejudice of any kind, to see people as people and not gay or straight, or tall or fat or black or white. I detest with my whole being,  the bigoted attitude of prying into people's private lives or the sordid attempt to control people's consciences.

A man or woman's decision to live his life according to the dictates of his conscience, to me, is the most human-defining deed. It is this moral intimacy of the feeling of a unique voice in him, which has propelled the British Southern Cameroonian to make auto-determined choices and not crumble under tyranny. They stand tall against totalitarianism, from debilitating edicts determined to nip them out of the human family. As to this, they do not permit solutions forced down their throats from Yaoundé or any other capital in the world. They have come to the noble knowledge that they are owners of their destiny.

Therefore, just like the LGBT today, our independence as a people, is not some imaginary celebration: it is a human rights jubilation - it is a triumph of life over death, - it is an exaltation of self-determination over emasculation - it is monumentalization of independence over domination. The Southern Cameroons is not seceding - they are battling against forces that are determined to wipe them off the map of the world, and forces that treat their sacred history as humbug.

Your Excellency, the heartache of today's shared ignorance comes from the deception that unanimity between like-minded humanists can happen solely in the restriction of geographical camaraderie. You are American, and I am Southern Cameroonian.  The earlier we begin to talk like companions and mutually solve each other's problems, the better for Mother Earth’s sustenance. "Many Jews of Saint Peter’s day thought that God preferred them, that God loved them more than he loved the Samaritans and the pagans.  It is this spirit that has created slavery, apartheid, colonialism, jingoism, annexation, marginalization, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, tribalism, etc. God is too big to reduce himself to these oddities. And Peter in the Acts of the Apostles articulates Jesus’s sentiments: “The truth I have now come to realize is that God does not have favorites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  

I consider that those who wish to leave footprints in the sands of time should learn to look beyond national boundaries, and dialogue with humanity's conscience anywhere. I see you therefore, not merely as some great personality of some great nation in the great continent of the great Lincoln. I see you more (and I wish you see me this way) as my brother, my friend, in the character of the words of the great African poet, Terence: "I am a human being, and thus nothing human is alien to me." For almost five years now, the Southern Cameroonian freedom fighter's stock-in-trade has been that of the brave ancient Roman: the stoic eminence who with unclouded eyes dares and does, to see their State grow, and push cowardice to barking toothless dogs. About their full independence, they can already hear it and even smell it before they can see it.

Therefore, Your Excellency, you have a vocation ordained by God, to help your great country cease skirting the issue of genocide in our land, get into the historical root of the issue, and not look approvingly on the myths and fictions fomented by the Caligula government of Yaoundé over the agonizing British Southern Cameroonian people.

WHO IS AFRAID OF INDEPENDENCE?

Your Excellency,  thirty-four years of visceral drinking at the cesspit of neo-colonial persecution and four years of exile now, have heightened my redemptional sensitivities and alerted me to so much that is special in the Southern Cameroons. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they will soon show up. Our people have shown wisdom in difficult times. Their ability to seize both pain and suffering by the throat and squeeze them of any lessons they grant in changing their circumstances, is heavenly. 

Therefore, my advice to you; an advice of a fellow brother: The shortest and fastest road to the future of the Southern Cameroons' problem is through the past.

For some while now, there has been doubt and debate as to whether there existed a thing like the Southern Cameroonian people, the British Southern Cameroon State? Whether the Southern Cameroons like Nigeria or Ghana or the Cameroon Republic, or Tanzania, had a past worthy of Statehood. Today, no such debate can be entertained by serious scholarship,  for, starting from my Independence or Nothing, to numerous history books and writings of famed scholars like Professor Carlson Anyangwe, history is revealing, to all who care to look, the overwhelming glories of the Southern Cameroons' past. These are a people that right back in 1951 enjoyed Self-Rule,  with a Prime Minister ( Emmanuel Endeley and later,  John  Ngu Foncha) recognized by the colonial master, Great Britain and later, the UNO; these are people with defined UN territorial boundaries and three Custom Posts separating them from the  French Cameroon Republic.

Since this crisis took this recent stage some five years ago, I have had a central idea, a commanding certainty, about the Southern Cameroonian, which has, all along, governed and guided me in my efforts. I communicated it to the world in form of a book, entitled: INDEPENDENCE OR NOTHING: Theology of self-determination and the British Southern Cameroons (AuthorHouse, 2018). I suggest granting you a copy, when possibility arises. In that book, I raised some pertinent issues, especially from a spiritual point of view, about self-determination and the principle of liberation. Among those things, I intimated that,

The Catholic Church has taught dogma for centuries. But a profound study of this dogma reveals that it is a liberating and saving dogma. To be dogmatic on the side of evil and oppression cannot therefore be the right attitude of the church. Already the Second Vatican Council, by insisting on reforms in the church, modelled the right attitude the church hierarchy should adopt towards any changes that are taking place around us today. The church’s social agenda proclaims human freedom and democracy by strongly opposing any encroachment on human dignity and freedom.  

The ideas in this letter therefore, are only the convictions of a careful observer, a heedful activist; they are the exponent of an aspiration - the patriotic aspiration of a lover of his native land and the liberating voice of a Man of God. My intention is that this letter carry ideas such as will be read with profit by all who are interested in the solution of the terrible ongoing genocide in the Southern Cameroons.

Dear Sir, there is no short cut to freedom. The wisdom is as old as humanity. Many tyrants have tried repeatedly to annul this dictum. Now and then, they seem to triumph, but in the end, they pay huge penalty. We know historically where it will end. When a people are determined, as the people of my land of birth, to wring back sovereignty, it's better to listen and grant what they want. With such people, the Southern Cameroonian people, 

the assent to the idea of sovereignty becomes a conviction, a belief. It fires the soul. It entices feeling. It warms the heart. It enlightens the mind. It emboldens the will. This is conviction - conviction in the sovereignty of a constituted people. When I see my fears starve to death, in that moment I have unbending conviction.  

  The Cameroon republic state machinery has cheapened our humanity. Independence like a good song demands expression. Our independence will not stay still, stay quiet, be nice, be modest, and be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in fever of euphoria, the high note that shatters the shackles and blasts the burdensome balloon. They will not triumph over our resolve, for, the gorilla can do nothing to the time-honored Kolanut tree.

But because the stream never flows uphill, because the leopard and the goat have never been bed fellows; but because the rat does not play with the cat and the cockroach does not call a fowl to a wrestling match, here's what we need: we need America's umpire role. The circumstances are so urgent you do not have to be a British Southern Cameroonian to be friend - you just have to be human. We are confident you are decent human beings.

Our people have undergone just one too many humiliations at the hands of dumb and waspish Yaoundé officialdom. The independence of the British Southern Cameroons is a crop whose harvesting cannot be long delayed, or it would shrivel into an international catastrophe because these people are so cocksure of the justice of their case they will not give up.

CONCLUSION

With the embattled temperament of Old Testament Jeremiah, I bear witness, Your Excellency, to the colonial occupying bully’s havoc on my people:  “A lion has come out of his lair; a destroyer of nations has set out. He has left his place to lay waste your land. Your towns will lie in ruins without inhabitant.”  They have trampled on the basic rights of our afflicted peoples, and have sold “the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed.” 

Before I am accused of imposing a way in which an ambassador should work, let me say that I do think civilization and decorum obliges that, an ambassador (especially of a country championing justice and freedom in the world) takes sides with the defenseless. Of course, each government of any country in the world has no ethical obligation to do things in a particular way. But there is the moral imperative, in the collective human conscience, not to allow oneself be used by oppressing powers against the powerless and the voiceless. Your Excellency, the powerful United States of America, the greatest nation of the world, has a bounden duty to call on the world to allow a brutalized and annexed people of the Southern Cameroons (a people with legitimate claims over their sovereignty) their place among the nations of the world. The burden of this letter is thus, that the time has come to call the emasculation of the people of the Southern Cameroons by its proper name; to give it the attention it deserves; to acknowledge their burning auto-determined ambitions and give their aspirations warranted moral support.

God is Southern Cameroonian! When He took human flesh and visited the world in Jesus Christ, his first pronouncement was, He has come “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”  Southern Cameroonians have finally realized He was talking about them. And this knowledge has brought back dignity and pride in their souls.

We live in hope, a dangerous hope - the inflexible faith of a New Israel; and we hear the God of Moses, the God of Amos, the God of Benjamin Franklin, and the God of Kwame Nkrumah, confide in the Southern Cameroonian: “I will bring my people back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit. will plant Ambazonia in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them.”  So long as colonial domination continues in the British Southern Cameroons; as long as a wolfish pest of a country can hold our people in iron chains of military occupation; as long as the international institutions play the Ostrich over a genocide that has shamefully taken four years without serious global attention; so long as our people continue to rot in jails and concentration camps;  so long as our homes and villages are repeatedly raised to ashes; as long as all this persists; our pens and voices will be there to bear witness and to ennoble and embolden the struggle for the independence and human dignity of our people,  the people of the Southern Cameroons.

By 

Fr. Gerald Jumbam Nyuykongmo,

 

 

MINORITIES UNDER MILITARY OCCUPATION:

The Case of the Southern Cameroons 

(Ambazonia)

 

The context in which we find ourselves here, in the midst of the United Nations Rapporteur on Minority Issues (Dr. Fernand de Varennes) is understood, but it would be difficult to concede to the idea that the Southern Cameroons is a minority. Can we call a territory that in history has had a Parliament, a Prime Minister, and a defined international territorial boundary, can we in all sincerity reduce it to just a demographic minority? We are a people, the Southern Cameroon peoples, and therefore self-determination is our business.

A West African proverb says that he who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body. The rain of military occupation that beat the Southern Cameroons began sixty years ago, from the day its independence was stolen, that is 1^st October 1961, through the 1972 dismantling of the two-state federation of equal partners, to Paul Biya’s outright declaration of war on the peace-loving peoples’ of the Southern Cameroons on the 30^th November 2017. This sinister declaration that would culminate into a vicious genocide would be the first in our parts of the world since the Biafran civil war to render a defenseless Southern Cameroon people one of the world’s endangered oppressed today.  

The Southern Cameroons never had an army. Throughout the Mandate and Trusteeship periods before 1961, some Nigerian policemen were deployed mainly in the capital of the Ambazonian, Buea. Generally, each community in the SC had its local 'police' , what was called Native Authority police. In the days of West Cameroun, that is, the period of their federation with French Cameroon, the Buea government established a police force. But it was not armed. The policeman had a whistle and a baton stick. Even when the armed Mobile Wing Police was created it was a special unit that remained in the barracks and was deployed only on special duty in some trouble spot especially in border areas with French Cameroun where the 'maquisards' from there tried to use the West Cameroon (Southern Cameroons) border areas as rear bases. So, our people generally never experience armed security officials. They were used to a civil police imbued with a high sense of discipline, integrity and respect for basic human rights. This armless innocent and defenseless nature of these peoples came as a result aloof their education. During colonial days under the British, it was the missionaries most especially the Catholics, Baptists and Presbyterians who were in charge of education. The British colonial masters never set up even one single college for the people. And so the education was education with a human and spiritual face, Christian education if you like. They never experienced any incident of violence by security officers. The policeman in the Southern Cameroons was a peace office and a friend of the people.

The only time the people of the SC saw armed soldiers was when the UK government deployed a battalion of the British army to ensure security during the plebiscite of February 1961. The British army built and was housed in three camps (built with prefab), one in Buea, one in Mamfe and a third in Bamenda. The British army was withdrawn from the Southern Cameroons immediately after the plebiscite.

2. So when Following the de facto political association with French Cameroun on 1 October 1961, the oppressing government of French Cameroun took three measures within the first week of October 1961. These measures were very traumatic for the people of the Southern Cameroons.

-  First, French Cameroun moved armed troops into the SC and were housed in the very emergency camps British troops had built and vacated. These were experienced by the Southern Cameroonians up till today as a foreign army of occupation: they spoke and still speak only French (meaning they cannot communicate with the people), they rough-handle and mistreat the people on the slightest pretext, and they are armed and ever-present and take pride in intimidating the people. They assume an air of superiority and conduct themselves as an out-and-out army of occupation.

They routinely carry out violent cordon and search operations (for what the people knew not) during which the people are severely abused and treated like prisoners of war. They also set up roadblocks every few kilometers along the highway for checking 'laisser-passer' and 'carte d'identite' and other documents it pleases them to ask. Non presentation of any document requested is punishable by torture and imprisonment.

Dear Friends we are talking about a 50-year experience of a defenseless people in the hands of military barbarians.
- Secondly, the repressive Yaoundé government decreed a state  of emergency over the whole of the Southern Cameroons. The state of emergency was for an indefinite period since it was renewable ad infinitum every six months. The state of emergency decree introduced detention camps called 'les Centres  d' Internement Administratif '. These were detention camps for those declared to be "dangerous to public security". They were not different from Hitler's Gestapo camps.

- Thirdly, six months later, in March 1962, Yaounde decreed a Subversion Ordinance which criminalized a wide range of ill-defined conduct and shielded the regime and its members from any form of criticism whatsoever. French Cameroun's system and practice of torture was introduced in the Southern Camerouns. Torture facilities known as BMM  centres: (brigade mixte mobile centres), were established in Victoria, Kumba, Mamfe and Bamenda. The favourite torture techniques were the 'balancoire' and the 'courant'.: a stand sort of device for suspending victims after they have been tied up like animals; they are made to swing on this device as they are subjected to merciless beating; often too, the passage of electrical current through the body of the victim, the points of application being the armpits, the genitalia, the eyelids etc.

The Emergency decree and the Subversion decree were arbitrarily enforced by newly created military tribunals from which there was no appeal.

 In May 1972 French Cameroun illegally decreed the federation out of existence and formally annexed the Southern Cameroons. This action was met with continuing protests by the people of the Southern Cameroons. French Cameroun responded by drafting more of its troops to occupy the Southern Cameroons with orders to shoot to kill. From June 1972 to 1989 incidents of military killing of Southern Cameroons' civilians gradually escalated.

Another peak point was the period of the launching if multiparty politics (animated by the Southern Cameroonian political consciousness), that is, after the launching of the SDF in May 1990 to 2016 the people of the Southern Cameroons rose up again like one man to protest against repression, occupation and colonization. The response from French Cameroun was the dispatching of more troops into the Southern Cameroons with orders again to shoot and to kill. Widespread killings by these occupation troops were carried out with impunity. The Yaoundé regime encouraged and glorified these killings by its troops in the occupied territory of the Southern Cameroons.

It was in November 2017 that armed conflict broke out between the Southern Cameroons and French Cameroun when the latter declared war on the former and poured thousands and thousands of troops and war materiel into the Southern Cameroons. The occupation has tightened entailing more and more widespread killing and destruction and occasioning hundreds of thousands of refugee and IDP flows. 

Thinking of an appropriate metaphor to describe the brutal unbearable nature of military occupation of French Cameroon over the Southern Cameroons(Ambazonia), I could only think of the metaphor of Kinfa’fa’ai – the poisonous wasp – a notorious predator of the insect family. Wasps, we learnt in our African story telling time, greet unsuspecting prey with an agonizing, paralyzing sting, then lay eggs on their body, which then proceed to ‘eat the victim alive’. The occupying military forces of Paul Biya have transformed themselves into the personification of Kinfa’nfa’ai. Our poor innocent people are daily eaten alive, to say the least, by the Cameroon republic’s military forces. Humanitarian crisis after four years, contrary to the underestimated figures given by international humanitarian institutions and organizations the real situation of the humanitarian crisis is progressively deteriorating with about:

v  15, 000 deaths

v   5000 detainees

v  400 burned villages

v  500,000 refugees scattered in various countries especially Nigeria.

v   2 million internally displaced persons.

v  800,000 children deprived of the right to education.

In four years, the bloody confrontations that have broken out in the Southern Cameroons have shocked the conscience of the international community, though they have refused to become part of the resolution of this problem thus facilitating the despot and oppressor to do his mayhem and go scot free. The silence is deafening especially from international bodies and media, the affected people must not be scared by the enormity of the task, by the immorality of the present. I call on the international human rights bodies, the African Union and the United Nations Organization to play fair. After all the problem at its roots is the failure of the United Kingdom and the UNO to grant full independence to a nation that was supposed to be one.

But the subjection of our people into mental and psychological servitude has been most dangerous to even physical military occupation. The fear of pain and suffering is no longer the problem, it is the struggle for survival that rules the minds of our people for this wild and barbaric occupation has been a thing so terrible and despicable that the word ‘genocide’ is beginning to be an understatement. But there has been another consequence, in fact a pandemic that is not talked about in this part of the world now as a result of the genocide. The explosion of mental and moral illness. Major depressions, psychosis, grief responses, schizophrenia, manic angers, from our suffering people - on a scale none of us have had before. They have been the story book victims of a cultural holocaust. Since the biblical story of Cain and Abel history has not inflicted on a people such brotherly betrayal as that in the Southern Cameroons and their so-called brothers of the Cameroon republic. Indeed, we bear the scars of brotherhood in a union between a lamb and a lion.

The moral illness is a weakening of faith in a moral international institution like the UNO that has let down our people and that has not only passed unnoticed the wounded man in the biblical Good Samaritan parable, but that seems to enable and encourage the oppressors of our people. History is our great teacher, and Ruanda is still fresh in our minds.

Military occupations are an act of moral cowardice on the part of the malignant oppressor, especially in the 21^st century where true power is displayed on the dialogue and debate table. For if the government of the French Cameroon knew that its presence in the Southern Cameroons is legitimate, why is the area being militarized? They know very well that the people’s hearts had long left Yaoundé. All that militarization is a clear indication that the annexing power knows that its days are numbered.

It is important to underline here that I am deeply involved in this independent struggle because my family has been victim struggle. The example of my biological father has inspired the whole family to choose the painful path of being the awakened conscience of our people- so my whole family is pointedly involved, more because they have been helpless victims of the bestial military occupation, so I would betray my conscience if I back down for I am firmly convinced that a true apostle of Christ must embrace, in the manner of Christ himself, the preferential option for the poor, the oppressed and the vulnerable of this world.  Consequently, we are nearly all in exile because of our outspokenness. My parents are wanted people, wanted by the barbaric political powers of Cameroon; and my life, since 2016, is in the balance, because it has received threats.  My father left for Nigeria in 1997 in exile and later joined us in neighboring French Cameroon in Douala for another 15 years of exile. So am in Italy enjoying the freedom I have never had in my entire life. I was already considered dangerous by the Cameroon Government because I was already on newspapers and the radio touching on issues concerning the country’s moral soul. There I already had ambitions to be a writer. Since writers name the unnamable, that is, to express what other people fear to say as Salman Rushdie said in his novel The Satanic Verses, writing became my own weapon against the despicable ethical and political situation of that country.

The Dantean Inferno, the hell of the Southern Cameroons today is abysmal. And the betrayal is not only external but it is deep within the revolution. The pain is that some Southern Cameroons have zoomed off into the best-cushioned limbo of saboteurs of the revolution. Or like some have done recently, rely on tainted information of a proud people, and withdrawn into a life of austere examination in search of masturbatory assistance by resorting, ostrich-like, to material from victims and the oppressed to paint the story of the oppressed people dark and to give victory to the oppressor. That the Church of the Southern Cameroons has sadly been a victim.

We have discovered painfully that no one can speak for us. And so our people are ready for anything, to gain their independence. Only those who daily live through the humiliations, the third class citizenships of the world, in the slaughterhouse of bondage, only we can fully figure out and see the sights of these inconsistencies in a world experiencing such speedy and puzzling changes.

 

You cannot suppress the truth. Colonialism is a crime against humanity, an international evil, and an evil which has been condemned by all nations of the world including the United Nations Organization(UNO). And when the colonizing power turns out to be your own brother it is even more disgraceful. The Southern Cameroons is a territory with well-defined boundaries, and its independence was hijacked or stolen in 1961. As long as the occupying forces of the Republic of Cameroon continue to do what they know is wrong, my people will continue to struggle. As God is always on the side of the truth, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Southern Cameroons would achieve its goal of a full independent State.

 

By

Rev. Fr. Gerald Jumbam

Ph.D., Moral Theology,

Professor, Italy

 

 

 

Rev. Dr. Gerald Jumbam Nyuykongmo's new book comes out today.

In THE NEXT AFRICA, Jerry Jumbam, whose theological experience allows him to see deep and far, explores the trouble with Africa in a fascinating volume that is as penetrating as it is challenging, scholarly, and comprehensive. The image of Africa that emanates from many especially of those who champion its cause for liberation rests, as a matter of course, in politics and the economy. What THE NEXT AFRICA does is to point out and push forward the theological angle (that is, the spiritual and moral) which to him (the author) is fundamental today in the uncovering, pinpointing and surgical operation of the worsening African malaise. But for true and life-giving theology to thrive in Africa – Jumbam seems to say - it must never forget its continental cultural, philosophical and theological origins, the Ubuntu. A landmark volume because it is one of the most hopeful and creative works about contemporary Africa, yet a provocative work to what Jumbam calls ‘criminal (neo)colonialism’.

In bookshops and online:

https://www.intermediaedizioni.it/home/1052-the-next-africa-di-jerry-jumbam.html

 

 

Esce oggi "The Nex Africa" di Jerry Jumbam, Intermedia Edizioni

Nel libro, pubblicato in lingua inglese, l'autore don Jerry Jumbam, forte di un'esperienza teologica che gli consente di avere uno sguardo profondo e lungimirante, esplora la questione dell'Africa in modo avvincente e stimolante. "L'immagine dell'Africa che emerge da molti, specialmente coloro che promuovono la causa della libertà, sostiene l'autore, risiede normalmente in ambito politico ed economico.  Il libro segnala e sostiene una prospettiva teologica, che è spirituale e morale, che oggi è fondamentale rilevare, individuando in modo dettagliato il peggioramento del malessere africano. Ma una vera e fervente dottrina capace di crescere in Africa - asserisce ancora Jumbam -, non deve dimenticare le sue origini culturali, filosofiche, teologiche, l'Ubuntu." "The Next Africa" è un'opera ricca di messaggi di speranza e al tempo stesso provocatoria per il mondo e per quello che l'autore definisce il (neo)colonialismo criminale. 

 

"The Next Africa. Finding Africa's Strenght through Spiritual Originality and Moral Responsibility"

 

In libreria e online 

https://www.intermediaedizioni.it/home/1052-the-next-africa-di-jerry-jumbam.html

CONTENTS

1.    MENTAL COLONIALISM  

2.    SPIRITUAL COLONIALISM

3 .    UBUNTU: AFRICAN SPIRITUAL WISDOM

4.    HUMAN DIGNITY IS UBUNTU

5.    LIBERATION IS UBUNTU

6. UBUNTU IS HELP OF THE HELPLESS

7.  FAITH THE AFRICAN WAY

8. SPIRITUALITY OF SELF-DETERMINATION AND GENIUNE AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE
        
9.   INDIVIDUAL AFRICAN CONSCIENCE

10.    COLLECTIVE AFRICAN CONSCIENCE

11.   FORMATION OF THE AFRICAN CONSCIENCE


12.   THE CULTURE OF DEATH

13.  INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION

 

FOR A NEW MORAL ORDER IN NSO:

 

An Open Letter to Dr. Godfrey Banyuy Tangwa

(alias GOBATA)

 

My very dear Dr. Godfrey Tangwa,

The opportunity, which has been offered me, of writing a letter to you, will not, I trust, be misemployed if, at the start, I venture to express a hope that its views on the great question of ‘Nso rebirth’ may secure for it a far-reaching broadcast, as well as the kind study of all the key players attentive to the condition of the Nso Kingdom. Nor can I doubt, that careful scrutiny of the subject will eventually lead, if not to the embracing of approaches entirely new, at least to a general adjustment of those older methods which are considered, today by our generation, as most disadvantageous to the civilization of our times.

Gobata, not even for a split of a second have I thought of implicating you, in any mode or manner, in a responsibility which is purely and entirely mine, but for the key reason, when such a task is laid in my hands to address so honored a kingdom as Nso, it seemed my duty, in meeting this challenge, to gain the support, if I could, of one of the most reputed African moral philosophers and bioethicists, who happens to be my own Wirnso brother, Dr. Godfrey Banyuy Tangwa. I thank God, for enabling me, to associate myself with you, on many intellectual accounts so dear to me - you who have made the Nso Kingdom scholarly proud, you who are the storehouse of Nso traditional ethical wisdom, you who are the very quintessence of contemporary Nso genuine intellectualism, you whose time-honored career has invigorated thousands of fledgling African thinkers in the academic calling.

But, I have said enough, by way of announcing your arrival; and without added delay, I turn to the subject of the day.

My dear Dr. Tangwa,

I should say, that I have no ‘real’ Nso, to argue for. I do, however, have great respect for the potentials and capacities of the kingdom of Nso, to battle for their vision of what they are, and what they want to be. There has been a colossal and premeditated attack against the notion of Nso society, without even a trace of doubt that such schemes don’t exist out of the figment of the imagination of those who foster such cultural ferocity. Allow me to come back to this later.

 A gentleman read some pages of a work I wrote about Kumbo and with the boasting of someone who went through some writing of a place he prized, asked me what sort of Nso identity I want to see emerge? My answer must have disappointed the chap. The question is not really a concern to me, I told him. I believe, I continued, that the real thing in life is a spiritual experience and that that experience is wholly a human experience. Nso is given to me, and it is what I do with it that matters. Being Nso came accidentally but it is the sole home. But Nso identity is quite confining. I believe that trying to define yourself as merely a regional being is childish. So I write about Nso not because I define myself as Nso, but because my spiritual pilgrimage, that is, my human experience won’t make ample meaning if the Nso cold morning harmattan skies, my grandpa’s mouthwatering orange trees, the Tooy thin dusty squirrel paths, my mother’s mesmerizing corn-fufu, the sacred night music of the dreaded Kikum-ke-vitse’e, are not consulted. And I really see it as a kind of nonsense for anyone to have to beat the chest and boast ‘I’m Nso!’ I mean Gobata, isn’t it obvious I am?

Now, the picture of Nsoness I argue for, is not one of assertive cultural sermonization and Nso narrow-minded dogmatism. It is that which allows, as well, ample space for intensive critical thought and concerted historical evaluation. People must know, that Nso is not a passive static fact of landscape. People make their history, that is, the Nso are a people who have energetically moved from place to place, dynamically made treaties with neighbors, passionately fought wars, occupied lands and extended their geography. So, Nso is both a geographical, cultural, and religious entity. Since the remarkable reign of Tah Mbinglo, great interest and variety in contextual Nso traditional paradigms has developed. This has likewise featured the splendor and color of customs and scholars in Nso land. This, in its measure, is a step in the right direction. But to take the thesis too far, that Nso is merely a making of its peoples’ struggles is to be disingenuous. They are a people who have their stories, their Supreme Power, their gods, their ancestors, their myths, their folklore from time immemorial. Sheer dynamism is at work here.

Dear and beloved Dr Tangwa, in this high-powered campaign for a new Nso, in this sheer collective ethnic camaraderie, in this family feeling that fetches all and sundry, what do we keep our eyes peeled for? The conceivers of this bold idea have made a difficult choice, a daring choice, and the right choice. The emotional effect is that, an enabling environment for all of us to apply our energies, our intellects, our creativity, has been generated for rebirth and reincarnation of the lost poise and vanished values symbolic of our proud Tradition. Nobody has to teach you and me that an African kingdom must have two heads – one for its homegrown customary sensibilities and one for the modern exterior susceptibilities.

In a little less than a generation, we have distanced ourselves from Nso Traditional Religion, and have sharpened our secular identity, of putting foreign convictions at the center of native life, at even Taakibu’. This has not augured well for Nso. To continue the unbridled quest for individual power and pomp at the detriment of communal peace, let them know that when one man cooks for the public, the food will be exhausted but when the table is turned and the public cooks for one man, his waterloo is only a matter of time. Let them begin to leave when the ovation is still rising on octave. For those who decide, instead of leaving, to joining the stream of agent provocateurs and overseeing the plummeting of Nso into a sinkhole of disaster, doomsday is around! How bad did tradition have to be to let sociopathic, conceited, spoilers of power enter where they are not supposed to? When a Kingdom strays dangerously close to a frantic devotion to one man, and cuddles the tendency to treat any disapproval as heresy, and hugs partisan arcana and faction-fighting, it stokes up steadily the fires of its own undoing.

 But, with the facts before us, a candid analysis must go beyond the defenders of the Fon arguing that it was solely down to the enemies of Nso; a candid analysis must go beyond the critics of the Nso King, pinning all the blame on the Fon and Nso Kingdom. The condition we are in, now in Nso, is one where not just everyday medicines are effective for communal health – we need a complete paradigm change in diagnosis, a radical adjustment in way of thinking, and a revolutionary path to treat chronic cultural chaos. Gobata, I have occasionally been berated for putting conscience before laws/customs, a charge that comes often from people whose life is yet to witness blood-curdling agony. And I have not changed my idea because no one is presenting a better and more charming one. Unfortunately, under pressure from a growing social diversity and globalized secularity, combined with a decline in the consciousness of rich Nso ethical values, some people are pushing for more legalistic and inhibitive options as a means of redeeming vanished customs and lost lore. The desire for real reform is noble, but it is dangerous when the space for good conscience is arrogated by all sorts of beliefs and superstitions in the name of reform.

A wirfon myself, of unadulterated Nso blood, I trust in authority; but in authority that wells in from within and not just from without. That is why, though comfortable with the power our Fons and Shufais and Fais and Sheys wield, I respect each individual's right to be their own moral arbiter. Let conscience take center stage now that culture’s place in our lives has come to occupy so many headlines. Yes, we are fortunate – fortunate to know these things. Because, of course, being part of the Nso kingdom, I wouldn't dream of sending out to kinsfolk what I myself have not already tested and seen to be true and good and beautiful. This is why I say, my brother, that conscience is the word in our society so attacked by forces unknown before.

Conscience is the feeling of being inside your head, looking out, of having a soul. Conscience has saved me from recent deadly perils. Conscience shoulders collective customs and ethics. Conscience is divine because it is God’s domicile in that still, small space of man’s heart. Conscience has been my soul mate to my voyage towards answers that came each time to me as if there was always a voice telling me to go that way, to take that direction that leads to peace and capacity and ecstasy; that river shore, it took me always, where ‘me’ meets God.

Moral conscience silences the blabbermouths of unthinking crowds, conscience shames the flagrant fake news heating media pages, conscience takes me deep inside the beating pulse of my heart saying: you are what you are, not what they have made-up you are. Leadership in Nso must be comfortable with conscientious objection. Consciences like rights, do clash. I understand that there are unformed consciences among us. But I would prefer an unformed conscience at work, to an incarcerated conscience. Of course to change the anti-conscience arrogances that we have planted in our hearts and in our culture over passing generations, is a pretty big deal. But then again, moral conscience is the real big deal.

There is no harsher satire passed upon us, no starker malice done to the Nso than by the Nso who assume that they are unfit for higher duties than that which consists only in creating trouble for kinsfolk and tearing the Kingdom into pieces. Dr. Tangwa my brother, there is a wretchedness in every human heart which wretchedness cash or capital can’t buy. This strange misery is not deficiency of funds or fortune; it is feeling unwelcome and unwanted. God has created Nso with plenty. The God who is plenty has gifted Nso enough.

Conscience is a word that has yawning roots in all salutary cultural traditions. Christianity for example, is my first book and I would think it remains my first book. The first people who predisposed me to the challenges of the world did so preeminently from a Christianity platform – mum, dad, Bernard Fonlon, John Henry Newman, etc. – and I have nothing but gratitude to the Catholic Church. But do not make the mistake of thinking that my high praise for the Church is one of blind and stupid conformity. I have wrestled with those who represent the Church in my vicinities on what true Christianity is. This tussling takes birth from a heavyweight lifting consciousness of a still-divine-voice in me called conscience.

Dr. Godfrey Banyuy Tangwa, it cannot be doubted that those who disrobe life of conscience disrobe life of responsibility, disrobe life of human rights. Conscience is not liberal consensus or a democratic counting of votes on a truth about a thing. Conscience is not man’s creation, but God’s. Its home is solitude, and solitude dreads the madding crowd. On conscience, the trouble with Nso is, that among those who lead, there is always fear to find accommodations with those who disagree with them. Our laws and practices are tangled and wanting in renewal; the said laws and practices find no resonance with the populace, this, because we don’t permit them think for themselves and accept rules from deep-seated unwavering convictions. A community leader, of an aboriginal well-meaning public like ours, must accommodate mature consciences, must harbor those who represent a loyal opposition to all that he does, must entertain those with difficult questions who expect from him mature answers. Conscience is the heart - passion for the good. Not in a vacuum it works well, but in zones infected by strong human feelings and passions. Its finest terrain is at the crossroads of human itchy impulses and wild affections, and the color of conscience is not the white garment of a medical doctor, but the red blood pours in the perturbing operation room.

Dear Gobata, tyrants, and imperialists have conspired to inflict on you and me, colonial conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Thomas Paine to his American compatriots of more than two hundred years ago, that “Tyranny like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph”. Today in 2021, the words of Paine resonate with colonized Bui and our entire country. Revolutions occur. They shape and inform history. The Southern Cameroons’ revolution is irreversible. A new spirit, of NsoFirst, has arisen and insists Nso packs its bags and walks out of the mayhem. Enemies of progress may not cheerily wave us off with a shrug. And we want today, nothing short of jumping to the island of Nso prosperity in the middle of this difficult river. The running of the liberation struggle from elite leadership has been a communal disgrace and the mounting amount of abductions and massacres a humiliation. The Nso Kingdom bus cannot remain on auto-driver, while the driver strolls up and down the aisle assuring passengers that all is well. Like unserious people we have played the ostrich, refusing to face painful facts about homeland and unpleasant truths about why our people are so auto-determined for liberation. We have proposed ridiculous solutions of love devoid of truth, of mercy devoid of justice, simply because we don’t want to deal with it. And we expect to heal!

Today, young spirited men and women have risen up like one man, determined to plunge our nation into previously unchartered waters, and inserted a mob of question-marks into the presuppositions of ‘One Cameroon’. This accomplishment is not merely political; it writes the more familiar historical colonial course. It moves the unspoken question: “is there a Cameroon?” away from a one-dimensional political stricture – away from mere verbiage and custom – to the more critical arena of morality and interior interrogation. It serves notice on the conscience of Nso, rips apart the hollow claims of legacy, and replaces them with hitherto minor, yet commonsense confirmations of moral conscience. Their actions have challenged the hypocrisies of international politics and the pomposity of our elite class. They have pointed it frontally to the African that the question is not that of mere survival but one of ringing back total dignity from a colonial unrelenting foe. Despite their exaggerations (and here there have been pitifully many such exaggerations), the young freedom fighters have cut the ground from under our feet and are ready for anything. A man recently clattered (and I think he is right) that a review of today’s Nso without a word on these defenders of our land is as laughable as a word about a Nso without Ngonso.  The Nso-First cultural crusade is sure to herald a fresh firsthand kind of Nso Kingdom. And such productive populism must also open the way for truth and justice, and self-determination and independence. It must pierce into the entrails of Nso intimate life and do a clinical operation on all ailments.

Healing is the oxygen of the world. When I invoke healing, the staple of this word I appeal to, is that which is candor-loving. Healing is moral, and I am not talking about bourgeois, fatuous rule-ridden, pharisaic, self-incriminating morality here. The new therapeutic moral order for Nso, I talk about, blows around, like the free wind we breathe. It is the instinctive urge to wish another well, in this upsetting pain-producing world. It is not purity, least of all righteous bigotry. It is compassionate Jesus in his Good Samaritan metaphor. It is Ubuntu’s “I am because you are and since you are, I am” and “he who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.” So, it is cathartic.

The power of compassion is the dire need of the hour, also the supremacy of empathy. And we must complement and affirm. Compliments are sunshine to the winter of the world. Candid compliments disarm souls and if the soul is in mud, they wash them clean. The power is in vulnerability. Everyone likes to be given accolades – a pat on the back. So, praise, hug, cuddle, kiss, compliment, but wait for no fee, for an encomium that awaits a prize, is an implement; an implement is a device and devices are schemes and stratagems. The trick with compliments is that you can also give yourself one. But not always when no one gives you one – always compliment yourself, like the mythical lizard who fell from a big cola nut tree and complimented himself “I did it!”. Your dignity is at stake if you starve yourself from compliments. Because compliments are affirmations of the truths people have done, they are sister to the virtue of truth. So they are morally charged because they give value to the human spirit. And therefore in a genuine moral order, compassion, courage, and compliments are three magically words. But among them, courage is the most necessary and the most precious too. Without the courage to face evil, to accept your true self, to turn around and begin again, there is no moral life.

Dear Dr. Tangwa, some twenty-five years ago, I paged through Dr. Bernard Nsokika Fonlon’s To Every Son of Nso. In that work, he defined Nso and explored Nso identity. It was a hypnotizing read. I take up today, with pride, his superlative perspective, on cultural leadership. And I say that homegrown governance if it is effective, must be questioned, must be quick to learn, must be open to people from outside its habitual circles, must be prepared to pay attention to opinions it might find unsettling. The apathy against his name as a consequence is understood – for, genuine intellectuals do not play it safe with compatriots. It is an intellectual’s duty to depict the shabbiness of corrupt cultural clumsiness imperiling communal bliss, to shine a light on dangers ahead and carve out an alternative course. If complicit now, what can Elites say when traditional leaders wreak social havoc, emptying the treasury of Nso trustworthiness still left?

Today, Nso initiative is everywhere on the increase; it has received unprecedented encouragement from NSODA, it is the talk of the day in NFU Europe in the popular hachtag #NsoFirst - it has won hearts with and in the Diaspora. Unfortunately, in Fonlon’s day, the reverse was true; and his publication of his To Every Son of Nso was an act of political suicide from which his character, was to suffer severe assassination, among his people. Shortly before he wrote the work, there was the old spirit of peace. Our people, under the banner of Fonsuiy, were a peaceable people. It was infuriating and even frustrating, to raise a voice against established traditional authority and established political bigwigs. Then Bernard Fonlon came and called us to accountability and to an examination of conscience.  To Every Son of Nso is therefore fundamental not only to a fuller familiarity with Fonlon’s theory of Nsoness, but to an appreciation of a fearless putting to use of conscience.

Dr. Bernard Fonlon has seared his mark so indelibly into the consciousness of modern Nso. His enduring vision in To Every Son of Nso was that, in the dim days that were approaching and have now inescapably come upon us, the fullness of the Nso idea demanded that the Nso intellectual becomes traditionalist and the devout traditionalist intellectual. He had expected that it was his mission to bring this honorable project to completion. But it was not to be so. His was that noble calling still: to witness by the way he experienced and understood the apathy, antagonism, hostility, persecution, and unpunctual appreciation of his contribution to Nso progress to the very personification of that model he had devoted his life to foster: the formation of the saintly Nso scholar. The work bore a message: it was a missile against narrowness. This parochialism – the guilt of his people – the very keynote of closed-mindedness, had narrowed Nso down to a point where it was dwindling in its obligation to embrace all and sundry. Instead, it was producing small-minded people who were living in their small worlds and thinking it was a big world, people who preferred the solitary “Nso” sky to the challenge, also, of the world outside, and – in failing to turn to the good and wise people of the Kingdom or to allow a thousand consciences to speak out – were failing to prepare Nso for the challenges of today.

Dear Dr. Tangwa, when you look at the many photos of Dr. Bernard Fonlon, you find a man who as he grew older, sorrow and pain fixed themselves upon his aspect. And it was the sorrow and pain of one who had a fundamentally and chiefly saintly, because Christ-like, tenacity to form human consciences and liberate minds and hearts. Of him, during this time of reproach and counter reproach, it can be said: “Now cracks a noble heart”. But this was a heart that could be satisfied only in the God who wished all were one, in a Nso Kingdom in which the intellectual and the traditionalist are determined to grow even more closely together in that camaraderie of kinsfolk shining like a big light on the mountaintop. 

Full justice has not been done Bernard Fonlon. There is about this man, we must admit, an abundant deal that is enthralling; and perhaps, in the appalling calamity through which Nso Kingdom has passed, such a personality – perplexing and controversial – is necessary. And, if Nso must rise from the gutter of its current chaos where what’s most senseless is regarded as most learned, if it must break its injurious run as a contentious community, here is one indication of that progress: more and more of us would be acquainted with the Bernard Fonlons, in our midst. And they too would recognize we wish them ingrained at the core of our collective life, not relegated to Nso obscure confines, to disappear and expire, little lamented, in a pessimism compacted in the flippant phrase, “na book we go chop?”

Our people say shinen she shuu shi yo’ yii ba’ri la’, that is, a loud and noisy bird would not raise a home, since like a man with a dead conscience (if only consciences do die), such a bird is a true loud-sounding empty gong. Conscience calms unmannerly human lips, conscience stills panic-stricken minds, conscience arouses human confident action. What I say is that while culture and tradition are remarkable, a people that hinder the workings of human conscience is heading for calamity. Once their capacity to think for themselves and make choices is compromised, communal accomplishment is sacrificed. The foundation for this is human dignity, and its killer is human emasculation. It would be difficult to expect anything else. The underlying point is not, as someone suggests, about the restoration of lost lore. It is that the central mystery of human life in a gifted community like ours is human conscience.

I am my own man. Let people be what they are. I say that I see no inconsistency in my being at once a good Nso and a good Christian. I am an indigene of the people who believed in the bongabaa-moo-yir-wan sagacity. But if they keep bigoted pride far away, if they say no to odium, if they distance themselves away from yimo, if they turn their backs on calumny and give a welcoming embrace to kindness, camaraderie and compassion, the teeming fruits thereof would be plentiful, since precisely, “an animal rubs its itchy flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him”; and if these words are true Dr. Godfrey Tangwa, we can no longer be indifferent to the time-honored judgment of our ancestors, that “wir dze wir bi’ wir”.

 

I free you then, dearest Dr. Tangwa, from this stretched conversation we have been kindred spirits, and, closing, pray you, and your whole family, to accept the best New Year wishes and prayers from your friend and kinsfolk,

 

Fr. Gerald Jumbam  

(Ph.D., Moral Theology)

1 January 2021