This essential duty of telling the truth makes the writing of History a thankless and even dangerous enterprise, especially if the Historian has to reveal unpleasant facts about people in high places – alive and powerful! Bernard Fonlon in The Genuine intellectual

As the political fabrications, State fictions and lethal forgeries of La Republique du Cameroun’s (LRC) government on Southern Cameroon’s agony continue to infect media houses, it is perhaps more fitting than ever that we turn to something which has always demanded that we look more closely for the root of the Southern Cameroons problem.

The high court of history is that thing. And therefore historical truth is widely reckoned to be the most powerful weapon against bloodsucking oppression and colonial propagandas – the type the Southern Cameroons is victim to in Africa, at the moment. It was the eminent German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer who said “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Theodore Herzl was laughed at when he conceived in 1896, the idea of a Jewish State. After a year, he challenged his enemies: “At Basel I found the Jewish State, If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years and certainly in fifty years, everyone will know it.” On May 14, 1948, exactly five decades after, the State of Israel came into existence. Today everyone recognizes it, and this is preeminently self-determination –the type that is gaining ground and taking root in the Southern Cameroons Ambazonia nowadays.

I talk from – I must confess right away – the standpoint of son of one ageless institution called the Church. Each time a country is declared independent, each Pope earnestly cheers it. The Church believes in freedom from tyranny of browbeaten peoples. One cannot engage in matters of justice and peace and human dignity without involvement in self-determination, in the sovereignty of constituted peoples, and in the liberty of chained human beings.Self-determination is hinged on the principle that man is born free. That his dignity is inalienable. That man is pinnacle of civilization. That there is a Creator. That man is image and reflection of that Creator. That God communicates to everybody and that conscience is that medium which this Higher Power talks to us.

The theology of Self-determination à la Gerald Jumbam rules out armed struggle and sees Mahatma Gandhi as the Morning Star. It believes that where there is truth the Holy Spirit blows and where the Spirit is, the impossible is enabled. It is hatched from God but takes flesh in man’s concreteness and daily doings. It eggs on members to change political systems that unman, that enfeeble. It believes in transforming structures rather than adopting colonial emasculating vestiges. It faces empire theology head-on and says No to its debilitating machinery. It believes that one culture is as good as another and so all of them must go through a self-purification when they meet God. It looks at banana republics as bastions of exploitation and is warrior against exploitation and dehumanization. It is refuge of slaves and voice to the voiceless. It believes with Aristotle that action is the way forward in that “there is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” It believes in the relevance of history and holds that politics can only be service if its doings are connected to moral values and anthropological bearings. These root-elements are absolute kings in the life of each human person. Without these first principles, self-determination is completely misunderstood.

The theology of self-determination therefore finds concrete expression in the flesh and bone of the ignominy of human suffering.

The victims of human calamity are the material of this creative theology. The Church faithful to her Incarnate Spouse Jesus would incarnate itself in the flesh and bone of our lives. She plays the role of whistle-blowing when tyrants strike the defenseless. She blows her whistle for non-violence by encouraging protest and moral defiance. Theology is either facing these particular practicalities and therefore at the very creative core of contemporary life or it is dead and buried. The one that flows in my blood and the veins of millions of British Southern Cameroonians today is theology of self-determination. Its dynamism in our hearts remind us of Pope Francis’ “the People of God is incarnate in the peoples of the earth. Devoid of commitment into the theology of self-determination, the Church in my homeland would remain outside the world of our people. It would masturbate with irrelevant phenomena and be dumped in the trashcan of history.

Were we to follow the assessment of the diverse qualities involved in the theology of self-determination, we should find that they can all be totaled in the word ‘redemption’. The demand for redemption – in other words liberation – makes the self-determination theologian uncomfortable with narcissistic givens that allow millions of poor miserable people wallow in yokes of oppression and wickedness. This brings the Church to the market place. For the Church has to take its place at the creative centre of culture for “each people is the creator of their own culture and the protagonist of their own history”[2] and therefore any God-oriented theology must return to and respect the people’s anthropology and the people’s history.

How does one begin to slash through this medley of connected matters of self-determination’s theology in an embattled context like the British Southern Cameroons? History bears us witness and furnishes tangible facts. It was Eduardo Galeano who said: “History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘see you later’”. The powerful rise today of the feeling of independence that has invaded the hearts and minds of British Southern Cameroonians testify to the relevance of Eduardo Galeano’s words above. The proof of this on the case of the British Southern Cameroons nationalism is the burden of this write-up

By Father Gerald Jumbam

Kumbo Diocesan Priest

To be continued