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,
