AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR OF OUR RESTORATION: TIME FOR PRAYERFUL COURAGE

It is remarkable how much the Bible has for oppressed peoples of the Southern Cameroons, Ambazonia. If we only know how much God loves us, how much He strengthens us, how much He protects us, we would not have anything to be scared of. Independence means auto-determination and therefore we are left to determine what we want, the way we want it, how we want it, knowing history and God are on our side. No amount of pressure would weigh us down. Comrades, remember always that “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:7).

Only by Daring and by Doing did a State Grow

What we need is – especially in cruel, ruthless, terrorizing regimes like Paul Biya’s - wisdom that comes from above, smart creativity, but above all the moral courage to dare and do. We have never been wicked; the Southern Cameroonian has been upright, righteous and candor-loving. Of course, “the wicked man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” (Proverbs 28:1). Read your Bible and count the amount of times God says “Fear not.” My Bible gives me 365 fear nots; that is, in each day of the struggle for our independence God has dedicated one ‘fear not’ to each one of us for each day. 

When the sanctity of my conscience, the spirits of  my warrior ancestors and the fire on the breast of my paterfamilias assigned me this task of beacon for the oppressed, I did not know it was the beginning of a long journey that would peak with the complete restoration of the independence of our people, the Southern Cameroons. A plethora of threats and bullyings has been voiced by the La Republique du Cameroun (LRC) colonial ministers, governors and military agents against our peace-loving freedom fighting Southern Cameroonians. Ah my people, LRC is jaga-jaga! They think they would distract us. They will not frighten even an ant because it is our right to protest, and we are determined to go all length and all out. Protest is a divine right, inalienable and fundamental for oppressed peoples. And therefore, I like us to look at courage with the simplicity the word itself captures. It is an uncomplicated word which simply means: first to face a thing or person, and secondly to deal with the thing or the person. 

Daring and doing demands four dispositions from the freedom fighter:

1. audacity in the face of danger.

2. confidence in the face of hopelessness

3. firmness in the face of antagonism.

4. victory in the face of hostility.

Courage says: I won’t be frightened, I won’t give up, I won’t be panic-stricken, I won’t lose heart. It is amazing how much courage our people, the common man has mustered. To you and me, God is saying:  “Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them. Be strong and very courageous.

Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go,” And then “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” These are times to spend with God – times that David trusted in his living God to deliver him from the claws of Goliath’s oppression, and God did.

If Mandela were a Southern Cameroonian

No one who desires the liberation of the British Southern Cameroons after its many and hoary bondages can have any other feeling but joy, at finding from the recent national and international protests, that our people are resolved to the teeth to see their independence restored. For a freedom movement so badly scorched by the heartlessness of its oppressor and the silence of its so called elites still licking the flesh pots of LRC,  the Southern Cameroons liberation movement has some cause for optimism as the protests at New York and all over our Southern Cameroonian national territory disproved the naysayers who thought our enthusiasm was waning.
The sense of belonging our people have mustered, the sense of courage our leaders have garnered in homeland and abroad have given all and sundry a renewed sense of purpose and encouraged a surge in members, taking our numbers to many millions. What is going on in Cameroon today is beyond the grasp of the human mind. There is yet no evidence to me what the young country called Ambazonia came to such colossal global identification so speedily. However, its ascendancy to this height strikes me as indicative of the state of the Southern Cameroonian in the current dispensation. It goes to say that the Southern Cameroonian, both those at home and the Diaspora,  have lost complete confidence in  blood-sucking political structures that have never had an elected president. And therefore our euphoria and celebration is justified, the euphoria and celebration of our independence.

An African proverb holds that a fly with no one to advise it follows the corpse to the grave. If no one advised our brothers who came out from prison, let they who are nearer them do well to counsel them on the level the struggle has now assumed.

The way to make self-determination workable in our pale is for us all to first come down from our high moral tools – from those self-seeking tools where we can attract attention. It is I call moral grandstanding. It is a phenomenon where each person has this resolute feeling that they are exquisitely correct while others are incurably mistaken. For most of us there are most horrible cases only in other groups. We are pure and therefore the world is centered around us.

In fact, if the definition of a freedom fighter, as one who affects the mind of his generation, is true, Mancho Bibixy is candidly the greatest freedom fighter the Southern Cameroons has had in recent years. Arousing awareness and stimulating admiration appears to be what has enabled his civil right activism and aboriginal capacity rival such great men as Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. Yet Madiba Mancho Bibixy is to us more than just quantifiable greatness; he is to the Southern Cameroons a genuine symbol of the miracle the sons and daughters of this embattled nation aspire to achieve – complete restoration of their sovereignty.

And what is that miracle? Mancho was incarcerated many months ago, but he had taken good care in just very few three months before his imprisonment, to ensure we will never forget him. 

Agbor Balla lost a great occasion for a Mandela to emerge in him, when he fell into the trap set for him by Ben Muna and his legal surrogates. During court sessions, the heyday of his incarceration and the  D-Day that conditionally ended this incarceration of his moments in prison, the euphoria expressed in support of him in the Southern Cameroons defied region, religion and tribe. Southern Cameroonians were thirsting for a Mandela in Agbor Balla and Neba, but reactionary forces didn’t allow that opportunity.  In the short aftermath of their liberation from Kondengui, their actions and silences have spoken volumes. Sharing a cup of drink together among companions some few days ago, someone cracked the ribs of his onlookers with loud laughter that our leaders from Yaoundé prison cells have been ‘la republiqued’ or  - to use the famous Bole Butake lexis - ‘lapiroed’. I felt during that gathering among friends that we should not jump to hasty conclusions yet. They have, out of the prison, shown both the good the bad and the ugly in them, but we must not judge that we be not judged.

Perhaps, if Mandela were a Southern Cameroonian he won’t be recognized like we recognize him...he would have died in prison! And that is why we must recognize Mancho Bibixy for what he is, and tell the LRC kangaroo jurists and politicians that if anything happens to our Mandela Mancho and his associates in your prison cells, the anger of the gods of Mount Fako and the ancient spirits in the Menchum Falls would react and the wrath of the God I serve would not allow his life to go in vain. The response from Ambas Bay would shock them.

And this thing is simple. If we get a man who is selfless, a leader who assures Southern Cameroonians he would die for them, a leader who doesn’t allow blood money to soil his hands, a leader who doesn’t allow empty promises from colonial Yaoundé to thwart judgment,  Southern Cameroonians will follow him. Sisiku Ayuk Tabe has, in a matter of just months proven to be that Oliver Tambo we badly needed at this hour. His faithfulness to the cause of the restoration of our independence is unbending. His characteristic sangfroid, his dialoging and cohesive spirit, his boundless courage in standing upright against the tyrant, his humility in governance has given us a leader that homeland has believed in and acknowledged as their leader in a unanimity hard to describe. My hope is – and it is only a hope – that this spirit continues in the right direction and that we give him our support and encouragement.

The SCACUF Governing Council under the muscular leadership of Tabe, Tassang and Atam has galvanized the people and given focus, has encouraged unity among disparate factions of our struggle and electrified the people to stand up as one man at a time when LRC’s maneuverings have struggled in vain to spirit away the spirit of self-determination from our peoples’ breast. They have disappointed and fluffed LRC’s expectations since the struggle reignited. We thank Ayaba Chuo, Boh Herbert, Dr. Akwanga - they can not be forgotten in their concerted effort to unite and make things happen for our Ambazonian nation.We pray they join hands and we march to Buea as one man.

It behooves the present Southern Cameroon leadership to see the huge presence of faceless fraudsters around our struggle as signals that the battle to snatch Southern Cameroon from the jaws of LRC is still a long and winding war. So long as Southern Cameroonians find ground to solidarize with  compromised characters, so long will they remain caught up in deep muddle and grave moral crisis. Our leadership impelled by the lofty sagacity of his Excellency Sisiku Ayuk Tabe is rising to the occasion and has refused to take refuge in myopic tribal politics. They have distanced themselves from the federated empty-talk that for 30 years now has helped to feed confusion among our people.

What is more, Mancho Bibixy has shaken the very foundations of La Republique du Cameroun’s Pharoah-like resistance and the Yaoundé Apartheid colonial system has confirmed that there is no one like Mancho with Mandela qualities in the Southern Cameroons. That is why they have kept him in prison.

I wish I had known Madiba Mancho Bibixy more, much more. I wish he had been around a little longer to give us more inspiration to get to know the struggle a little more. I had the once in a lifetime opportunity to experience him spiritually during the Joe Wirba Kumbo rally. In his slightly feminine but powerful voice he could not hide his enthusiasm and his determination. It felt like KUMBO was the moment he had been waiting for the last 56 years. What a born freedom fighter!

Human Rights abuse of the most Horrible type

The shooting of civilians to death, using animal imagery to describe the Southern Cameroonians – rats, dogs, two cubes of sugar – has been a disgraceful fuel to what Ruanda went through in 1994. The Genocide. Until some few days ago our grand-mother from Ekona, a mother in her Nineties was monstrously pierced on the forehead by the evil hands of military bastards. Is there a good and bad method to portray wickedness? When a terrorist government wants to exercise beastly power over millions of unarmed civilians and protesters, when it has abducted hundreds and killed many, is what we call government in LRC any longer necessary? When that political cabal calls itself “ a one and indivisible State,” and it takes inspiration from atheist theologies abroad and rapes students and assassinates even prelates, why not refer to it as such? What’s the use of opting instead, to call it a government?

 We must learn to call things as they are for what has perpetrated the plague called North Korea is the fact that journalists had persistently called it before the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is obviously the antithesis of a democratic republic. Deploying words against  absolutism and despotism is difficult to do in Cameroon, even among writers, clergymen and journalists.  Yet, in the words of Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, “Art should expose, reflect, indeed magnify the decadent, rotten underbelly of a society that has lost its direction.” The artist must see the rotten underbelly stinking rubbish that spoils the air of his people and propose ways they can do away with it or escape its debilitating effects.

I take off my hat for the resolute poor masses, the hoipolloi of the Southern Cameroons and I denounce the many elites of our land for their promiscuous use of poor people’s revolution, their hijacking of the achababoys’s anger against a despicable system, and their using it to benefit their empty egos and financial positions in the name of a federation that is an unnecessary option for the typical man of the two Cameroons.

The Southern Cameroonians’ determination in seeing LRC as an artificial edifice forced on their throat is dramatized in the thousands of calls its people have publicly made in protest.

And therefore, the idea of a one indivisible Cameroon is an absurdity. Cameroon is a collection of two self-contained and distinctly independent Political States, estranged from one another by territory, by divergence of history and traditions, and by ethnological, political, social and religious barricades.

Political upstarts from Amadou Ahidjo to Paul biya have radically altered the rapport peace loving people had with their history and torn apart their people’s sense of identity. In fact, things have fallen apart – to invoke the title of Achebe’s first novel – with the arrival of the colonial programme of Paul Biya and his terrorist attacks on the Southern Cameroons. He has lost legitimacy over them – a legitimacy he never had in the first place.

LRC has a scary history of perilously balancing herself on the cliff’s edge from time to time. And each instant frequently comes with a considerable quantity of nervousness and deadening horror. See what humiliation the almighty Laurent Esso passed through in Belgium – and yet would not learn. They take decisions which scare even supernatural forces to sympathize.

La Republique du Cameroun(LRC), this so-called nation, has arrived at the frame of mind of a madman oblivious of where it is going to. The pathologies that LRC suffers are incurable. Now, those who have argued that we have even never had a country now look the wise ones. We have only one thing to do: embrace our country Ambazonia, a brand new country for ourselves, with a people-driven constitution, and a leadership that is answerable to the masses. Only our Anglo-Saxon heritage can deliver the goods to guide us through a democratic journey. No more no less.

 The clamor for independence is the fundamental option of this era. It is fundamental because it is the final phase of the liberation of our people. Many people loud the word freedom as if it means everything we opt for. It does; but remember that even Paul Biya uses the word freedom when he emasculates us, remember he uses it when he abducts our children and parents. Remember that Tchiroma uses the word ‘freedom’ when he uses the apartheid LRC media to spew invectives on and parody our victimized and raped peoples. What I say is, that to qualify the plight of our people with the word ‘freedom’ or ‘federation’ is as lazy as the system that has put us in servitude for 56 years. It is independence we are talking about and therefore I am not just supplying an argument to the muddled debate over the evil that has been meted on the Southern Cameroons by LRC. I am making a case for the primacy of restoration of independence come 1^st October 2017.

The Southern Cameroons is no joking Matter

 The British Southern Cameroons’ peaceful protests, civil-disobediences and agitations have been long enough to justify us in acting as such, in matters of self-determination in the annals of history.

Its character, validity, and credibility, its tenable principles, its integrity and standing cannot more be approached as a matter of proposal or idea, unless we may plausibly so regard the Gambia and Eritrea. And therefore the Southern Cameroons is no subject of pastime or amusement. It is concrete material, it is existence, it is out there in the streets, it is the destiny of millions of people who are after legitimate space to breathe. It has become public property. In the words of the Psalmist, its “message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world. God has made a home in the heavens” for this country, the British Southern Cameroons.  
   Of course I do not say that we have surmounted all huddles and filled every pothole on the matter of the case of our sovereignty. We say that it has a reality that needs more than human calculations, human reasoning, and logical semantics. It is reality itself and shows itself in this that life is life, that Ambas Bay is Ambas Bay and not some wishful thinking. You can’t simply reason it out, but you can feel and touch and hear and imagine and live it. There is a self-evident surety about it that only God can better qualify. That is why it were better we die than that the British Southern Cameroons doesn’t gain sovereign space. 

One cannot engage himself  like the Church, in matters of justice and peace and dignity of persons without getting involved in self-determination, in the dignity of people’s sovereignty. Freedom is God’s gift to you. He creates and allows you to make your decisions. To do your thing. When there is that sense of human worth, when it is difficult to allow any man trample on your personal rights, you can’t live under a yoke. You will fight for your people. 

At some period, liberation theology was treated with contempt by high profiled theologians. From  a parochial and purblind viewing, they saw Karl Max’s agenda in the work of South American theologians. Guiterrez and Boff particularly went through this screwing. Their detractors didn’t see the good battle these Latin American luminaries were doing with structures of poverty and unbridled capitalism. Theology of the tyrannized, theology of the downtrodden, theology of self-determination – whichever one you wish - calls for the men and women of faith to not only empathize or mind about the poor. It calls on them to cry for a 90 year old mother whose forehead is recently pierced by the bullet of a Cameroon military soldier-of-a-bastard, for nothing. It calls on them to engage spiritual communities onto moral values, onto improving the social standards of the marginalized and oppressed. It underscores the urgency of human dignity. The current Cameroon’s calamity, I believe, is largely a calamity of spirituality and morals. A society where unruly deportment from individuals and State goes scot free without penalty - the breeding of impunity.

Come to think of it, someone has even dared to pose as teacher to me on how I am supposed to comport on issues concerning the liberation of my people and the restoration of their stolen dignity. To teach me what I should know about this, is to teach the Pope Catholicism. It is impossible.

Fantastically fight, fight to restore your independence. Fight wherever you reside – homeland or Diaspora, keep the fight on. The only Kilimanjaro we are to climb is the determination to victory to independence even when depravity stares at us in the face. This is current and alive as I speak and with a sense of our history on board, we are ready to go any mile to see this through in the teeth of any adversity. This we do because we keenly feel we have matured enough to be vessels of our own Statehood, our own destinies, our own Country.

By Fr Gerald Jumbam

---

[1] Psalm 19: 4; The New Living Translation.