THE PROBLEM OF SCHOOL ATTENDANCE IN THE BRITISH SOUTHERN CAMEROONS

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. Martin Luther King Jr.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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"Every day I leave my house...my family knows...for the past twenty years...when I leave my house I know I will not come back home. Every play I write, Any poem I write,  I write as if it is my last poem, as if it is my last book".       Bate Besong

The launching of the Independence Revolution of the Southern Cameroons has been like the umpire’s whistle blow for which Southern Cameroons’ freedom fighters have been waiting on the sports’ ground.  In one short generation a massive package of  new feeling has spiraled into being from all over the country and, for the first time since 56 years, the Southern Cameroons’ present generation begin to picture in their mind’s eye not some green-red-yellow thing, but have imbibed how to see a dove as symbol and heavenly blue and immaculate white as colors of their much esteemed nation. The enthusiasm that has stimulated this national feeling has been great indeed. I hate to make mysteries out of nothing, but I am seeing a new powerful nation state come to being. I say that the enemies of our progress should know that their obsession with seeing the burgeoning Southern Cameroons destroyed by all means possible is a big waste of time and akin to waiting for the ship at the airport. And therefore, like Dylan Thomas once said of writers, I say today that there is only one position for the Southern Cameroons’ freedom fighter anywhere; that is, upright. This upright position is the fruit of a self-determination that is legal, forthright and God-ordained. 

There comes a time when man must shy away from fear and speak out his mind for a generation and for institutions that he owes allegiance. My allegiance to the Church (as one of those institutions ) is allegiance to the truth and not to unreflective persons. Christ is truth and his Body is truth’s bulwark and dispenser. It is my contention that the Church (and not that of clericalism or that aligned to State power) has always been the staunchest defender of the Southern Cameroons’ culture and statehood; that the golden eras of the Southern Cameroons history have also been high tides of the Southern Cameroonian Church; and that the Southern Cameroons' nationalism only would become disordered and perverted when it strays from the guidance of the wisdom of the Beatitudes of Jesus Christ and that of the fear of the Lord. But confusion has visited the Body of Christ the Church today as a result of the problem of school attendance. While a majority of Church faithful are crying foul at the Church’s hierarchy for persisting to open school, some unknown people have engaged in burning parts of some schools. Because of the recent attacks on schools owned by the Church, it is not clear to the Church hierarchy in British Cameroons whether they should open their schools or not come September 2017. But as a son of the Church I would like to make my own statement about the prevailing situation and thus clarify the Church on this issue of school attendance. 

Will the Church Make or Mar?

When the Catholic Church in France stood in the way of the French Revolution of 1789, the French philosopher Voltaire said this of the Church: “Crush the infamous thing”. The Church in France by taking sides with the oppressor had made itself so unpopular with the French people to the extent that a moral and spiritual institution like the Church became ‘the infamous thing’. The peoples of the former colony of the British Cameroons are today asking for their freedom and independence just as the peoples of the French Cameroon had organized and fought for theirs.

If there is anything which Jesus Christ came into the world to fight for, it was for human freedom. Hear Him: “I have come that ye may have life and have it more abundantly”. If the Church is to remain faithful to her mission of saving life, she cannot be on the side of the oppressors of the human person. Man is made in the image of God and anybody who oppresses man is therefore oppressing God.

The attitude of Amadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya towards the peoples of the former colony of the British Cameroons have been consistently diabolic and has been recorded in the writings of such eminent Cameroonian Catholics as Bernard Nsokika Fonlon( The KNDP Memorandum of 1964, Will we Make or Mar) and Cardinal Christian Tumi (The Political Regimes of Amadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, My Faith: A Cameroon to be Renewed). From the evidence provided by these two eminent Catholics, it is clear that in the struggle for the independence of the British Southern Cameroons, the Church cannot be neutral. She must be on the side of the suffering and oppressed people of the British Cameroons whose sudden clamor for independence and freedom is seriously turning world over the attention of freedom lovers, to this part of the world. 

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 gave the right attitude the Church hierarchy should adopt towards the so many 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 Catholic Church in the Bamenda Ecclesiastical Province should therefore desist from supporting the evil and oppressive regime of La Republique du Cameroun. 

The struggle to liberate a people has always been fought around the issue of education.

It is the enlightened minority that has always led the masses to freedom. Hence the growth of the Western school in Africa gave rise to the struggle for African freedom and independence. It is indeed around the Ngugi wa Thiongos, the Wole Soyinkas, the Leopold Sedar Senghors and the Denis Brutuses that African freedom was fought. 

That the freedom of the British Cameroons should today be fought around the issue of the school is a reflection of history. 

Why is it that LRC is insisting that schools in the British Cameroons should reopen? So that they may continue to destroy the young minds of our children in their so-called schools. What is today called schools in the British Cameroons is a destruction machine put in place by our enemies from LRC. When the British ruled here, the school system produced the likes of Bernard Nsokika Fonlon, Kitts Mbeboh, Bate Besong, Siga Asanga, Kenjo Jumbam, Asonganyi, Ngoh Nkwain, Charly Ndichie, Bole Butake, Augustine Ngom Jua and Albert Mukong. All these were systematically targeted and killed or silenced by the evil regimes in LRC. 

To what kind of schools then do we want our children to return to? Is it not a wise act to call the attention of the world to the horrible situation in the British Cameroons by keeping our children at home? Is it not proper that we should let the world know that the Ahidjo and Biya regimes have killed all the leading Anglophone intellectuals in Cameroon? And the worst of all after completing the so-called schools, how many of our children are ever employed? Why are our children, in desperate need of jobs, pushed to have sex with dogs and serpents in Kuwait while Francophones are feasting themselves fat on SONARA oil in Limbe?

Our children today are distressingly immoral and the situation is becoming even more alarming. Which school system is producing these reprobates if not of the school system that our Bishops are calling upon our children to return to? Are marks not bought and sold in our schools today? Are examinations questions not made known to the children of the high and the mighty before examinations are written? Do our so-called teachers not transmit marks sexually to our female students? Is mediocrity not rewarded and excellence punished in our school systems today? Is immorality such an important component of our school’s curriculum today that we are unable to see the colossal damage we are doing to the Southern Cameroon youth of today? The answers to these questions are blowing in the wind. 

Our school system in the British Cameroons is so sick that one cannot but take sides with the School Revolution occasioned by the irrepressible Tassang Wilfred and his colleagues Teachers’ Trade Union. To do otherwise would be to sell one’s conscience for a cup of garri. 

The Murder Machine

As a teacher of divine mysteries, I am most partial to education. There is, however, one type of education I would rather the world had never known. It is the assimilationist murder machine French Cameroon has hung on the neck of the peoples of the British Southern Cameroons for decades. It ranks in my mind as one of the most miserable, most morally enfeebling learning processes known to the world.

The metaphor of Mandela is a  fitting one on explaining the narrative going on about school reopening. So much has been said about this proud son of Africa that my voice would seem to be hard of hearing. Yet, I know I know something of what Mandela represented to his South African people that I do not need to be deceived or distracted by voices that are shallow about the Mandela figure. "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”, are his most famous words on education. We will do well to recall the noble words of Nelson Mandela on education and the context they took in addressing the predicament of South African scholarship. There is time for everything. Therefore let it be known that those words came not from the Mandela of prison cells or from the Mandela of 1990. It was Mandela the president. He had achieved the grossest of all human rights – freedom from tyranny. Then classroom education could come now since they already educated themselves in freedom fighting: of the importance of man’s independence, of the importance of the human person and of the importnace of human dignity. Seek you first the Kingdom of Freedom from Tyranny and all other human rights would be added onto you. Wherever tyranny is so cruel as is in Southern Cameroon, life is threatened; and the right to life is the greatest of all rights. This because without the right to life the talk about education, classroom etc. is meaningless. 

Mandela’s words come in the context of a world that had manifold challenges and that required a modeled excellent tool to answer the multifaceted questions of the African struggle after independence. Mandela as president singled out education, and rightly so. Change in our communities would only come through educated men and women. Yet looking at Mandela’s quotation from another Christian point of view I say that it doesn’t say all that needs be said. Look at the political kleptocrats, the financial thugs, the cabal that rule LRC – these are all men and women with what we call education.  Yet they are a disgrace to those they govern, to our continent. So the most powerful thing in the world, to us believers, is a person. It is Jesus Christ. It is his Gospel; for “the mystery of our religion is very deep indeed: He was made visible in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed to the gentiles, believed in throughout the world, taken up in glory. (I Tim. 3:16). Having an educated person without the wisdom that comes from God, from Allah, from Jehovah, is a waste of resources. Men and women need to be educated alright, but that education must build the moral and spiritual foundations of the peoples – and we know very well that there are many educated swindlers and tyrants out there.  So if you ask me, I will rephrase Mandela’s words thus: ‘Education is one of the powerful weapons which can change the world, but the Gospel is the most powerful’.

Indeed, freedom fighters and human right activists are the greatest educationists of the world. They are because they are experts in humanity, they are because they teach us what man is, what he is capable of.

They teach the world the worth of human flourishing. They teach us the inalienable rights of man, they bring us to the knowledge of the infallible truths of life. The freedom fighter’s main weapon is education. And let me be clear about this: our sons and daughters within these months of struggle have had an education like never had in the history of the Southern Cameroons – the education of the worth of the human person, the education of knowing their rights, the education of living by the Law, the education to freedom fighting, the education of standing strong against injustice and oppression, the education to autonomy and sovereignty, the education of seeing their parents beaten, humiliated, abducted and imprisoned and their indomitable spirit to fight back. That is education of the highest worth – education to virility. These are things they have heard happen in South Africa. They are witnesses to them today in their own land. And therefore our children are in school. They have never stopped going to school. The classroom has changed from colonial emasculating classrooms to decolonizing classrooms building courageous citizenry. And therefore when the Bishops of the Southern Cameroons quote the Second Vatican Council with the benign words on education, they are right. They are right that we would not stop at just classroom talk, we would go after education that mans, education that emboldens, education that speaks of the divine attributes of Truth, Justice, Love, Faith, Hope and Human Dignity. The Church has never stopped teaching these things in pulpits and the personal example of Saints. They have never stopped going to school. So let us give a break to this colonial nonsense called classroom education from LRC's homicidal education, this murder machine that has assassinated all godly principles in our hearts. I am virulent in denunciation of this murder machine and of celebrating its FINAL FULL-STOP in our land. Let us look up to real things, to real education for our children – and that would come from us, from our kind, from our educated men and woman and not some half-baked nonsense from Francophone forged fries. 

The Conviction of your Independence

The constant seeking of a balance between independence and liberty from tyranny has been the Southern Cameroons freedom fighter’s unavoidable burden and boon. One suspects that to them, independence means courage and responsibility. It means doing things not monitored by fear, but out of conviction. Man’s sense of integrity is noticed when fear has no space in his heart. Little wonder that Peter affirms: “I saw the Lord before me always, for with him at my right hand nothing can shake me.” (Acts 2:14,22-33). This is the conviction of a freedom fighter. Independence  does not question. It does not say, why? Any such skepticism is betrayal. The Questioning is somebody who is still disbelieving and cynical.

Disbelief is the biggest obstacle of a liberation movement. 

It is not a bad thing as such to ask questions, nor to seek to be clarified. But such questions should take the name of examination and not questioning. In fact we cannot without silliness call ourselves at once examiners and skeptics. Those who believe for example that the independence of the Southern Cameroons looms large and seek to be clarified on some things are examiners into that cause.  Some people have denied within them the truth of independence before questioning it. Their questions are clouded with dark clouds, clouds that are impossible to disappear because they are stubborn on their stand. I therefore hold that a true Southern Cameroonian is either penetrated into the truth about his sovereignty or he is not. He is allowed to examine, and he is fake if he examines by questioning the country’s autonomy. The assent to the idea of sovereignty becomes a conviction, a belief. It fires the soul. It entices feeling. It warms our hearts. 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, that moment I have unbending conviction.

Conviction is saying stop to worries.

Conviction is not success. It is the power to fail without losing the ground under your feet. Conviction is a stonework of a wall against the flood waters of despair.  Conviction is accepting I can’t control everything – that I can throw myself on Someone’s shoulders and say take it all. It is God’s whisper to man to the effect that he is there for him. It is the moment you say with saint Paul I can do everything through Christ who strengthens me. No matter how much your soul is shattered, you will not surrender. 

Conviction tolerates what is, conviction is uncomplaining in moments of teething trial, conviction throws itself completely in the hands not only of the future, but on to God. The resurrection message to the apostle was ‘peace’, ‘peace I give to you’. And next to peace, was: ‘fear not’. When we believe God, he puts his peace in our hearts. And it is the only one thing – God – that remains when conviction looses friends and popularity.  God.

Priest and Patriot

I believe in standing up to tormentors. I speak because the assault has crossed my personal line. I am a priest of the Kumbo Diocese in the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda. I was raised up, thanks alone to the sweat and suffering of the English speaking peoples of Cameroon. And as Christ says in the Holy Scriptures, “To whom much has been given, from him much shall be expected”. It is therefore but logical that people of the British Southern Cameroons should expect me to tender an account of the education they gave me. To do thus, I must defend to the last of my energy the Anglo-Saxon school system which brought me up; a school system which is under full threat of destruction by the evil regime in LRC. It is to this call that I am now responding and let every man in the British Cameroons be responsible for the health of his own conscience. 

And that brings me back to the question which has haunted Cardinal Tumi throughout his life: Should a priest be concerned with the political life around him?

Cardinal Tumi has said in his work The Political Regime of Amadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya that a priest is first and foremost a citizen of his country and must vote in elections as a sign that he is a politically responsible being. A priest cannot vote responsibly if he doesn’t take enough interest in the political life of his country, the Cardinal argues. As a theologian I would say that this is sound moral theology today. 

Now, has a priest the right to fight for the freedom of his country? Can a priest be a political nationalist? Church hierarchy in the two English speaking regions of Cameroon would strongly hesitate to give an answer; but the most dogmatic among them would not hesitate to say: “No, he should not”.  One of the greatest mistakes that the early missionaries did was to always identify themselves with the colonial master. For this reason, the first African nationalists tended to believe that the Church was a hidden or spiritual arm of colonialism. Today in independent Africa, this belief ought to be abandoned because the mission of the Church and the State are not the same. Politics and spirituality are not the same fields of study although there are points of intersection. 

Gauging the Political Temperature

To continue to support the neocolonial political structure put in place by the colonial masters who were obviously enemies of African freedom cannot be the right posture for the post-colonial Church in Africa. 

As for me who is seeing very clearly today the injustice done by Great Britain to the peoples of the British Cameroons, I have a great duty to fight for the freedom of my people. It is obvious that if reunification were an issue in the British Cameroons question, the UN and France would not have gone ahead to grant independence to the French Cameroons on 1^st January 1960. By so doing the UN and Britain showed clearly that they had a clear duty to grant independence to the British Cameroons. Hence the prefacing of the Plebiscite question “do you choose to gain independence by joining …”. This means that both the UN and Britain knew very well that the British Cameroons was supposed to be independent. 

It is this independence that I am bent on fighting for, and it is this that all British Cameroonians should fight for.

This fight has already started on the right battle ground: the School. And anyone who chooses to send his child to the warfront of the school should expect his child to be knocked down by the hot exchange of mortar and artillery. 

For let me tell you that the situation in English speaking Cameroon has become so tense that if the present provocations by LRC are not halted, war will become the only way out of the present dilemma. And in a war theater there will be no place for schools. Are the bishops who are calling for a return to schools actually gauging the political temperature in the British Cameroons? Will any of these bishops have a child to lose in the event of an attack on a school? 

My dear parents, why did schools close up prematurely last academic year? It was because the bishops, the pastors and principals could no longer guarantee in the school milieu safety and security for our children. Are we sure that social tension has not increased with the donkey intransigence of the Government of LRC and its refusal to dialogue with the teachers and solve the educational problems created by the regimes in Yaoundé? And do you think, my dear parents, that the resultant social tension is an appropriate environment for learning? Let us not fool ourselves. Since 1961 LRC and its hoard of gendarmes have shown that dialogue is not a word in their vocabulary and that they would stop at nothing to oppress and torture the peoples of the British Southern Cameroons. They have militarised our land, our schools, our everything and want to fight against defenceless civilians with artillery. We the British Southern Cameroonian civilians are so civilised we would not fight back with your own weapon. We would do the fighting with civil-disobedience, with ghost-town, with moral defiance, with non-violence. We shall not join you in your normal vandalism in towns and villages.

Our New Name

I have recently defined my destiny and spelt it its proper name. The brutal thought comes and quickens the desire to want to free yourself from their contemptible yoke. It comes from the tremors of learning that the country where your native land is found and the land you owe your being and name has not in its whole structure of actuality fashioned any space for you. 

One of the key qualities of sovereignty is the ability to spell your proper name, to tell your own story and decide your destiny. We traded our true name and took over something that caged us for 56 years. They did to us what Tortoise once did to other animals in the legendary story our old parents used to tell us around the fireside. It is the story of Tortoise and the Birds. The birds are invited for a great banquet in the Sky and Tortoise their friend convinces them to take him along. They first hesitated because they know how cunning, untrustworthy and covetous their friend the Tortoise is. Tortoise convinces them that he is a changed person, a born-again Tortoise. So the birds accept and decide to donate a feather each to help the Tortoise join them in the flight to the feast. They further fall for the Tortoise’s tale that it is a good thing to change names for such an important banquet. They birds have never heard such a thing, but see it as a wonderful idea. Each one takes a name. The birds carry very boastful and glorious names like ‘the elephant’, ‘queen of peace’, ‘Daughter of Zion’, ‘Star of the Sea’ etc. The tortoise declares his own name. It looks a very strange and unattractive name. He says he would like to be called during the party ‘You all’. The birds give it a laugh and congratulate themselves for taking such a comedian for a pleasure trip. When they arrive the venue of the feast in the Sky, and the people of the Sky present assorted dishes for the feast, he tortoise jumps up and asks the host: “who is this feast intended for?”

“You all of course”, replies the hosts. “You heard them,” says Tortoise to the birds. “the Feast is for me. My name is ‘You All’.

We are told the birds took their revenge by taking back their feathers and leaving the Tortoise high and dry in the Sky. But that does nothing to satisfy their hunger as they get back to the earth hungry.

The lesson, on our struggle, is clear: never again should we take a false name as we did during the 1961 and 1972, even when taking them in playfulness among ‘friends’ and ‘brothers’. 

Just like a plant must have the soil from which it grows, so also a culture must have a political framework within which it grows.

The destruction of the English State of West Cameroon in 1972 by LRC was therefore a destruction of the political framework within which an English culture could grow in Cameroon. Given the hostile attitude of the French imperialists towards Anglo-Saxon culture in Cameroon these past 56 years of the so-called Cameroon Reunification, it is clear that English culture in Cameroon is completely dead. And nobody can ever accept a political arrangement which leads to its own sterility or death. 

As  I see it, the independence of the British Southern Cameroons is an urgent necessity today. 

It is surprising that the other members of the British Commonwealth Organization could accept a political arrangement which leads to the death of English culture in any part of the world. Conclusively, the membership of LRC in the Commonwealth should be terminated because she cannot be bent on the destruction of English culture in Cameroon and still lay claim to its membership of the Commonwealth. For where are the English examinations today in Cameroon? Where is the City and Guilds? Where is the London Chamber of Commerce? Where are the RSA stages One and Two? The other members of the British Commonwealth should follow the example of South Africa which now houses the Southern Cameroons Broadcasting Corporation (SCBC) and press for the independence of the British Cameroons. 

We Shall Fight with Gandhi and King

The time to fight has come, and this fighting will not be done while our children are wangling their way through bullets and tear gas from LRC's lawless military on the children's way to school.

The battle is on. It must be fought to the end. The necessary tools for this war are Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. for a remodeling of our national moral character. Our people have suffered under LRC's despicable militarisation of their space. Ten thousand offences are punishable with imprisonment – marching in protest, civil disobedience, speaking your mind, stealing a guava fruit; and after all the excesses of the banana republic at home - the seas of blood they have spilt, the rapist soldiers of state - the fomented prejudice and jealousies over its citizens are merely argued away and nothing is done. We shall not retaliate with violence. We shall humiliate them with love, with protest, with defiance. As long as the Southern Cameroons is in chains, the only commendable position for the Southern Cameroonian men and women is the position of rebellion. This because the most honorable option relevant to good and wise men in the face of outrageous evil of such ethical proportions in Cameroon, is non-violent rebellion and civil-disobedience.

Genuine Nationalism is Holiness

Restoration of independence is not new wine in the Catholic Church’s cup. The Vatican State itself is the paradigm par excellence. Remember, the Papal states had lost all their lands in 1870 as a result of the unification of Italy.

But thanks to the spirit of self-determination that grew in the hearts and minds of some brilliant Cardinals and bishops especially under the auspices of Cardinal Pietro Gasparri and Pope Pius XII, the clamor for Vatican’s independence became muscular. Mussolini had no alternative in the face of these uncompromising prelates. He bowed to them.  Because of this inflexible determination for sovereignty, the Vatican  did not only retain the autonomy of the present Vatican land; it also received £30 million in compensation for lost lands and the Pope was also given a State retreat house called Castel Gandolfo.[1]

 

The Vatican city is country located within the capital (Rome) of another country (Italy).  It has its sovereign rights and enjoys the autonomy enjoyed by sovereign nations. It has an area of approximately 44 hectares and a population of just about 1,000 inhabitants. It is the smallest nation in the world and its independence was hard fought, and restored in 1929 against the threatening clouds of Mussolini’s subjugation and political maneuvering.  So in 1928, the Christian Vatican Country stood in the same position the Southern Cameroons stands today. By the daring and the doing of Pope Pius XII the Vatican restored its independence in 1929 with the signing of the Lateran Treaty.  Thus the power of self-determination.

In another erstwhile development, precisely in the 19^th century during the struggle for Italian unification and liberty, Rev. Fr. Vincenzo Gioberti did not hesitate to call upon the Pope to lead the Italians in their struggle for unity and freedom. In 1834 Rev. Gioberti wrote down his views for the liberation of Italy in a book entitled De Primato Morale del Civile degli Italiani. Fr. Giorberti worked alongside other Italian nationalists such as Manzoni, Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour for the liberation of the Italian people from foreign domination. 

Today as a Phd student on Moral Theology in Rome, I salute the memory of Rev. Fr. Gioberti whose attitude and activities clearly showed that there is no contradiction between the struggle to be free and the struggle to go to Heaven. 

Rightly understood, nationalism and the priesthood are not incompatible; for genuine nationalism is one of the surest roads to holiness and sainthood. If this were not so, why is it then that the Catholic Church in Tanzania is today calling for the canonization of their first president, Julius Nyerere, if not for his genuine nationalistic character and temperament?

Truly a genuine Christian is a genuine patriot and you cannot like Cardinal Tumi has done, act in a genuine Christian way without impacting on the nation's political scene.  Today, like Rev. Gioberti in 19^th  century Italy, I am compelled to be on the side of my people of the British Southern Cameroons in their struggle for independence and freedom. 

So God help me to free my people of the British Southern Cameroons from the ugly claws of a flying and rampaging tyranny in LRC. 

By Fr. Gerald Jumbam 

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[1] Cfr. Wikipedia

AN OPEN LETTER TO BOH HERBERT ON THE PLIGHT OF THE PEOPLE OF THE SOUTHERN CAMEROONS: HOMECOMING OR HOMEGOING?

Dear Mr. Boh Herbert,

I write you because you know it, you have it and you get it. I write you because you talk sense and you, like many, have suffered as a result of you stance. I write you because you have dared the structures of evil back home even in those dark early 1990s. I write you because you are the cream of investigative and genuine journalism in our native land. You have been the spokesman of our troubles and woes in recent times. Now it will be preposterous and officious in me to put myself forward as champion of anything in this struggle, but I know I have space on it because my family has suffered as a result since 1990. My father has been president of SCNC at the heart of the most hazardous portions of Southern Cameroon, Kumbo. My father was in exile in Nigeria in 1998. He left us for two years and we in the family suffered persecution. He was imprisoned last year in the Bamenda military prison, a man in his Seventies, and only came out by the mercies of the intervention of Christian Cardinal Tumi. His life is not safe at this moment as we pray for him. I am priest, but I know what is happening because I have been privileged to be groomed by a man who has been near these things for a very long time, a man who has suffered for our people. Yet my father is my father. I am me and I have my own way. 

BREAKING THE SILENCE: BEFORE MY DEAD BODY IS FOUND UNDER THE RIVER SANAGA

Courage, the willingness to die in service of the truth, 
is indeed the writer’s strongpoint,   Gerald Jumbam

Of all the tools used to stay long in power by  born-to-rule State political Mafias in Africa, political assassination has been the most effective for the elimination of their enemies.

And therefore just next door to us some years ago, Dele Giwa, a distinguished Nigerian journalist was murdered in a bomb parcel blast in his residence allegedly coming from President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. His last words were ‘this must be from Mr. President’, and as he opened the parcel he was blown up with the gift. In a country like Cameroon that one man has stubbornly remained in power for 35 years, high profile political killings would happen with masterly accuracy.

Perhaps the assassination apparatus on those religious leaders who stick their heads out would be most flourishing in such a nation state.

An example couldn’t be more auspicious for Cameroon as the assassination of Yves Plumey the emeritus archbishop of Garoua by unknown people in Garoua and the threat of slaughtering Mgr Wouking in Yaoundé. The out-and-out butchery of Fr Anthony Fontegh and Fr Engelbert Mveng would come as another atrocious augury of what can be expected in a nation so accustomed to anarchy and chaos. Little did we know that in 2017 an even most shocking killing would visit the Cameroon Catholic clergy in the conspiratorial beastly assassination of that humble and candor-loving Jean Benoit Balla, bishop of Bafia.

All this points to a consistent conspiracy against genuine Men of God in the Catholic Church in Cameroon. And the question to ask is who is behind these assassinations? Is it the Cameroonian clergy that is at war with itself or is it an attack by the State on Churchmen who refuse to toe the Government line? Or is it a collusion between evil men in the Church and evil men in the State? Nobody can ever provide adequate answers to these questions for the simple fact that a person who tries to pry into the secret workings of the Church and the State in Cameroon is most likely to end where the other dead clergy ended: that is, under the River Sanaga!

Plaudits for an Open Letter that almost broke my Back

I must say that the positive feedback I have received for my recent write-ups have surprised my highest hopes.

The glory can only be given to God. When writing especially the Open Letter to the President of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon, I had no intention whatsoever of seeking for any notoriety or fame. 

It came out from frustrating circumstances about my life and the life of millions of Southern Cameroonians who have lost their loved ones, whose brothers and sisters have been forced to exile and whose brothers and sisters are languishing in appalling situations in prison cells in Yaoundé and elsewhere as a result of the crisis bedeviling us these days. I have had threats from church hierarchy in Cameroon and from agents of the State as a result. Seeing that a man of conscience should not die with his mouth closed, because that would be tantamount to hiding from future prelates and clergy where the dangers of their vocation lie, I have boldly decided to break the silence and to defy those authorities who have connived with evil by trying to frighten people with death, forgetting that death is the end of all human beings. 

I wrote the Open Letter from the platform of a priest of Kumbo - one of the dioceses of the Ecclesiastical Province that Archbishop Kleda had been snared by the Yaoundé political cabal to undertake so unpopular a trip.

That is why I addressed the letter from the secretariat of the diocese I am married to as an ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

It was a serious letter I could only address from a posture on bed with my spouse (the local church of the diocese of Kumbo). I addressed it from that platform because I am proud of my matrimony with that diocese.  

To some people who out of their blind obedience to anything Church (and which I have no problem with such obedience from such faithful) take my open letter amiss and therefore hold that I disrespected the office of an Archbishop, I like to say they have completely misfired. My intention was superior to just disrespecting an office. There are many influences that brought me to the writing of the letter which still strengthen my conviction that that letter was the right thing to do in a time of such great moral crisis. The influence of the psychological trauma and emotional anguish I encountered in 1997-1998 when I was in high school when my father went on self-exile because of this very plight of the Southern Cameroons we are suffering today. My family and I suffered terribly at that young age of my life. I was deprived of a father at that delicate age and up till today the emotional effects of that deprivation are still felt.  Then again, another trauma came when news came to me overseas that my father was forcefully taken from the church premises of his locality to the military concentration camp far away at Bamenda and there were slim hopes of him coming back to us in the family. This disturbed my whole studies that last year. Lately, my family has gone through a self-exile ordeal during some months of these few months of our people’s crisis. These painful situations - among other grave influences below - provoked the letter I wrote to the Archbishop. 

Moreover, who can explain to me that after university students are brutally beaten, some raped and others carted away to detention camps, and hundreds of other citizens in other major towns of our Church province abducted to Yaoundé for flimsy reasons, the President of the National Episcopal Conference (a Bishop for that matter) would not address such an issue with the Government first.

He would rather travel to the victimized people to attempt to verbally force the parents of the children to call off the peaceful protest of stopping schools and civil disobedience that the people have put on to put pressure on this Government to release their abused and abducted sons and daughters from despicable prison centers. I felt that the Archbishop was completely insensitive to the plight of the suffering people of my Church Province. He needed a response from the bitterness that welled up in me as a result of my frustrations about what my father and other victims went through in such prison cells last year.  I raised a vociferous alarm with my pen for the thousands victimized in Southern Cameroons and I decided to shout it out so the world can hear my sufferings and the misery of our people.
I should say that I wrote what I wrote out of no bad will for anybody but in defense of the suffering Church of the Southern Cameroons and in resistance to the oppression defenseless civilians were (and are still) undergoing as a result of the malevolence of military bastards and political  sycophants sent by the Yaoundé  political cabal to my homeland. 

Another influence is that I could not (and still cannot) understand – as I expressed in the Open Letter - that French Cameroon bishops (which the Archbishop is among them) could maintain such blameworthy silence without any public declaration decrying the whole act, after whole bishops (their brothers of the British Cameroons) are taken to civil courts. On this, I am still not sure by writing to him the letter, I was crying more than the bereaved on this matter. 

I also wrote the Open Letter when I keenly reminded myself of the disaster that will befall a country when real men prefer to look the way and keep quiet in times of overwhelming ethical crisis. I considered a beautiful and chaste portrayal of the German World War II calamity painted as follows in writing by one man of wisdom: "The story is usually told of how Years after the devastation of Germany in WW2 ... There was a meeting of German eggheads ... And the question was how did it come to pass that a nation that produced Great Thinkers like Friederich Nietzsche. Karl Max ...Albert Einstein....Bruno Bauer. Friederich Engels... Etc ..etc...get seized and goaded into ultimate destruction by a looney like Hitler... Who was not even originally German but Austrian!!!! The thinkers came up with the conclusion that complacency and indifference until it became too late ... Was the main cause!" Consequently, the real misfortune of German history at that point in time was not the ruthless sycophancy of an Heinrich Himmler or the gullibility of the German populace.

The real problem was that only very few German Churchmen, philosophers, artists, theologians and scientists identified Adolf Hitler as the personification of wickedness. The penalty paid for such grand failure to call a spade a spade was the loss of 20 million lives and a huge demolition of property worth billions of dollars. Evil triumphs in communities when good and thinking men do nothing. I was driven by this famed idea to write the Archbishop. 

More often than not other people tend to see the world only through their own eyes and thereby limit the truth only to what they know. These people are suffering from what psychologists call projection. So it is not surprising that some bigguns have accused me of dishonesty in my writings whereas what is in fact happening is that they are projecting their own dishonesty into the world; for as Jesus Christ himself said, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh”. That is, an evil man speaks only evil words and a good man speaks only good words. I will therefore not be surprised if dishonest people see dishonesty in me; for is it not dishonest that good men like Fr Anthony Fontegh and Bishop Jean Marie Benoit Balla should be assassinated while those who accuse me of dishonesty keep guilty silence? Is such culpable silence not tantamount to flagrant dishonesty? I know that in all societies, writers are unwanted people. But what did people like Jean Marie Benoit Balla write before they were assassinated? Writing is my passion, a passion given to me only by God. Therefore no despot whether in Church or State can take away that passion from me. 

In challenging times I have sought wisdom from the Holy Writ, and also from my ancestors in African Traditional wisdom. Our indigenous people say that ‘every community has enough firewood in its own forests for all the cooking it needs to do’. I have been ‘community’ as a result of my independent spirit, a ‘community’ of my own uniqueness. Haven given myself to celibacy, this has been good for me. With no wife, no child, I have been ready for anything. Maximally alert of any threats to my life. I knew the government was searching for me. I knew the Catholic Church of Cameroon was dismally expecting me to come back so I could be taken to the Inquisition of interrogation, suspension or stressful concentration camp of an appointment to cry my ass out there, or as it has sometimes happened, even sell me out to the Cameroonian forces of lawlessness and disorder. I have made no mistakes. Actions premeditated. Words measured. Appearances theatrical. I have survived. 

Let me be clear. My verses for my Catholic Church came not from maddened contours of jaded thoughts. 

It is a Church I love with my whole heart and even if I were to be punished by the Church Hierarchy for my iconoclastic writing, there is an aboriginal Catholicism within me that no hand on earth can erase. My reaction to the recent hunt after my life as a result has been vigilance. I suffered in Rome alone. Interrogations filled the air. Threats, espionage, and surveillance, and sometimes from unexpected quarters.  And someone has been playing the drum in the bush and they are dancing in the middle of the road. In this internal anguish, my strength has rested on one man’s shoulder – God; He who spoke truth into my conscience to speak truth to Episcopal power has been omnipotent enough to shelter me from the wolf. 

 

Ink in my Blood: The Problem of Living by the Pen

"Every day I leave my house...my family knows...for the past twenty years...when I leave my house I know I will not come back home. Every play I write, Any poem I write,  I write as if it is my last poem, as if it is my last book".   Bate Besong, the Obasinjom Warrior

Courage, the willingness to die in service of the truth, is indeed the writer’s strongpoint.

Cowards who have no heart want to compare themselves with writers. There is nothing in common between writers and cowards, whether those cowards be in Church or in State. In all ages writers are always a species under threat from tyrants and dictators. And this is understandable; because those who have skeletons in their cupboards will be frightened when the wind of writing starts blowing. After fifty years of paroxysm – not only the 1972 referendum coup d’état but also foundational socio-political uprisings – the British Southern Cameroons’ writing is healthier, livelier, and blooming than it has ever been.

But Bate Besong and Bole Butake carry the eagle feathers of the ink in blood, for they had prophesied  to us about this seismic political pandemonium we of the Southern Cameroons are witnessing. Listen to the Obasinjom Warrior’s (Bate Besong) prophetic effusions to the British Southern Cameroonian writer right back in 1993:

We are in the season of harrowing self-analysis. We are the products of an age of profound discontent. We are an embattled people under the cancerous embrace of national integration”, fighting against titanic odds … And yet, there was a time when people had faith, implicit faith  - in this Union – without making any investigations. But I ask you, where is that faith now? It has vanished. So utterly! The bonds have snapped. We carry the scars of  “brotherhood” in a country so unaccustomed to candour. The literature of a people is the mirror of that community… Fellow writers… the literature of an embattled people must be the mirror of that society.[1]

With this piquant 1993 utterance, Bate Besong orchestrated the writers’ wind of change in the British Southern Cameroons. 

To a cultured mind, writing is as inevitable as breathing. A writer is to preserve culture, to symbolize God in His truth, to keep it clear and keen - ready for action on any emergency or peril. And therefore to train himself for plain sincere discourse, he must be a person able to give opinion. He enlivens lives with new ideas and shapes public discourse; so that the old truths his forefathers championed can return with full freshness. The poet, the playwright, the pamphleteer, the journalist, the novelist, the preacher, the orator. The writer stands tall. He fires up phrases, weaves revitalizing words, lets them become feelings and domestic expressions of the national fabric. 

Interpreters of our people’s destiny, prophets of their populace, the Bate Besong-like writer holds the Southern Cameroon’s flag high up to our peoples' gaze. 

Christ said you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. The BBs, Bate and Bole tasted the bitter cup of this truth in a regime so unaccustomed to morality. They suffered, they suffered – they are resurrected with Christ. 

And therefore when Jesus wanted to prove that his enemies were wrong he often said “It is written…”, meaning that Christ himself knew the power and value of writing. If Christ knew the weight and worth of writing, why should somebody in Christ’s Church today stand up and say he is against writing? 

It is almost the mission of the writer to govern and rule the country. Because they supply potent words to prevailing freedom fighters, they  wage a moral war of conscience and debate, and make sure truth triumphs. 

Undoubtedly, a writer of the Southern Cameroons in times like these must agree on the sacredness of certain things about his country: One, that the territorial boundaries of his country, carved and promulgated by the UNO and UK, are sacred and inviolable. Two, that the forthcoming government is infallible in matters regarding that enclave; Three, that up with mount Buea for that is inalienably what we know as capital; four, that our allegiance shall be unbending to her. 

Literature and destiny have between them woven three-quarters of the somber story of the Southern Cameroons.

The literature of a nation is knit out of its soul. If you must know our people’s heart and mind, you must enter the school of its poems and tales. They came to being to delight no one but us, the British Southern Cameroons. Our literature is us talking to ourselves. 

To write therefore, is to chronicle your own story, to tell your own tale. Who but me can throw light onto arrogant and self-interested opinions that have been said to blackmail my name? Who but me can tell my own story and not allow people to submit prejudiced and half-truths about me? Who but me can tell those who purport to rule over my life more than the Maker who created me? Allow it, they will tell your story and tell it unfairly. And the African adage is true: until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. I shall write my story, I shall - like the lion - not allow the paragraphs of my life be written by hungry hunters. I am certain of nothing but the presence of the now and the truth of today. Let those people come who can lay me bare without stripping off me from my today. You have all it takes to steer the course you choose. So take your destiny into your hands and act now. Life is now. Tomorrow is for weaklings. Let that light shine, let it shine in writing. 

The word clergy originally meant a scholar. If the original meaning of the word clergy means a scholar then you are not ashamed to be seen as a scholar in the Church. It is only those others who have abandoned their role as a scholarly light in the Church and the world, who should be ashamed of their position in scholarly darkness.

For there are some people today who do not know that the word clergy originally meant a learned one. One of the reasons behind priestly celibacy is that the priest should have enough time to read, meditate and write. But how do most African priests use the time at their disposal? Certainly not. If not, the wrong things going on in Africa would not be happening. Writing is not incompatible with priesthood but it essentially finds itself in the essence of this vocation.

I have made the brave choice, the choice of writing: tackling issues with the pen, without fear, without worry, mindless of panic, but with the full preparing to take the penalty of writing in a dictatorship that smells of a stinking toilet like that of Cameroon. Writing is a gift. God gave me that gift and if somebody is not happy, he should go right to God and express the dissatisfaction to God. When it was written on Christ’s Cross 'King of the Jews' and the Jews themselves protested to Pontius Pilate saying he should have written that 'he said he was King of Jews', Pontius Pilate made a classical statement: 'What I have written I have written'. In times like these, it would be most appropriate for me to say as well that ‘what I have written I have written’! 

Death, where is your Sting?

The Nso have a philosophical statement in one of their indigenous names Wiyfengla, which means no one will escape death. Death is everyone’s lot. When ‘leading Churchmen’ and State tyrants who spew death threats upon writers and clergymen begin to behave as if they will never undergo the transition which all living things must undergo, one begins to wonder what kind of formation they received. Any priest or bishop, be it in the Sanaga or somewhere in Iraq, should feel concerned at the butchery of any priest or bishop anywhere in the world. As our brothers’ keepers, we all must rise to the challenge. To unravel the mystery of Fr Anthony Fontegh, Fr. Engelbert Nveng, and Bishop Balla’s assassination, is one of the ways of paying part of the debt to their living memory.

I began this essay with the name of Dele Giwa - one of the most celebrated Nigerian journalists and a man who paid the price of moral courage in writing, by being assassinated by his president.

My motto of life in writing is some sterling words Dele Giwa left behind for any serious writer: “I have said at every available opportunity that NOBODY tells me what to write in my column. It is my property, and I guard it jealously, for it is my freedom to think and write as I see. Nobody higher than me in the Concord Group has ever demanded my column for editing before publication. Any reaction to any of my columns has come after publication.” As long as some of us are still around, the spirit of Dele Giwa lives on. 

I am a Cameroonian priest of the Kumbo diocese, at present a Phd student in Rome. And from the intrigues that surround my person here, I can see the evil hand of the Cameroon Church and State in it. But let these forces of darkness know that my conscience comes first before any authority. Pusillanimous threats and covert underhand tricks can never replace the courage to speak out the truth as I have done in the past and in the present write-up. Just as Socrates said in the supreme court of Athens before his exit from this evil world, 'you can never harm a good man whether in this life or in the life after this.' Your intrigues cannot harm me. So let us all wait for the day of reckoning with a clean heart and a clean conscience. For no man however strong can ever escape the karmic consequences of his own character. And so you will not. 

The Church whether she likes it or not must share the fate of the country under which she lives. I think this is what Cardinal Christian Tumi was trying to say in his books The Political Regimes of Amadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, and My Faith: a Cameroon to be Renewed. Cameroon will never be the same again after the great example Cardinal Tumi has shown to us. By confronting the State machineries of evil, this Prince of the Catholic Church saved the lives of so many people in Yagoua, Garoua and Douala. He was an exceptionally good shepherd who knew the value of courage and bravery and was always ready to lay down his life for the flock. 

Now, rather than take up the good work Cardinal Tumi started, national Church hierarchy these days has repeatedly been trying to shy away from the big social and political issues in Cameroon and therefore deserve to be interrogated by society. And if that episcopate does not read the handwriting that is boldly becoming very visible on the wall, and join the people of Cameroon in their struggle for liberty, social justice and good governance, it would become anachronistic and will increasingly be pushed into the dustbin of history. 

In the upcoming struggle, dear bishops,

the future will surely be our witness, even as we now bury our priests assassinated by the State!!!

Fr. Gerald Jumbam

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[1] BATE BESONG, Literature in the Season of the Diaspora: Notes to the Anglophone Cameroonian Writer, http://www.batebesong.com/2006/03/literature_in_t.html, 1993.