Southern Cameroons is what “Kamerun” has never been !
It is common to hear misguided individuals like Laurent Esso, Paul Biya and even some uninformed opposition political parties appeal to the political argument that Anglophones and francophones have always been one and united as Kamerun; and that the sad stories of colonization must not be given merit through inadvertent legitimisation of the evil by virtue of some collective investment by proponents into a project to birth a Southern Cameroons state.
There has never been a state or nation called “Kamerun” in any sense of the term. “Kamerun” was a scattered and uneasy Western cocktail of independent kingdoms forged not by a common longing by the former to live together; but by Berlin’s capitalist considerations. There was no natural thing as Kamerun; no natural or artificial nation called Kamerun. There has never been a state called Kamerun in both the material and spiritual as well as even the legal sense. It is an artificial illusion in the minds of dreamers that are victims of brainwash campaigns of forces of oppression of Southern Cameroonians. It was the German’s own piece of the spoil. It reminds me of the soldiers who scrambled for a piece of the cloth of Jesus Christ, just crucified. It was a cunning consecration of the wild, primitive and inhuman imperialistic lust of a late Germany of Otto Von Bismarck who sought to catch up with his British and French counterparts in the race for Africa.
Africa is a natural being, while Kamerun is artificial. This thing they proudly call Kamerun was the baby born by the primitive policy of the hinterlands which required that all Europeans who held annexed African territories in the coast now move inland, swallowing up everything virgin land on their way until they ever met any other European presence. This thing called “Kamerun” is the indelible scar of the deep wound of white imperialism in the armpit of Africa. It is the forceful collection of potential natural states that did not care that in defining her boundaries many other potential natural states were split in the process. We should all be ashamed to commemorate it. There has never been a nation; there has never been a Kamerun nation.
Invoking, therefore, the nostalgia of a purported great former Kamerun is cheap politics that lacks a legal base. More than “Kamerun”, Southern Cameroons was a state; an autonomous state whose international sovereignty was managed by Britain on behalf of the UN. Southern Cameroon is a child of the UN. Not even Britain had the leverage to deal with her as she pleased. Southern Cameroon is and was a state in her own full right. Our independence lies visible on the ground. All we need do is bend and pick it up.
We need to go to the UN for our independence. But we need to pass through France.
Angelbert.
