Cameroon: Rekindling the Mystique of Independence to Bring the Nation Together

How scattered places become a nation

In every part of the world, confluences of rivers, hillsides and stretches of land combine to create a nation. At first, these spaces always exclude one another.

Looking at Cameroon’s forests and savannahs two centuries ago, an inexperienced observer would have described them as ordinary places.

Behind those ordinary places, there were, of course, human beings.

Yet no one would have believed that, within the ‘chrysalis’ of those scattered populations, the chrysalis of a future nation was developing: Cameroon.

What created the Cameroonian nation was not simply the coloniser’s act of bringing together ‘yesterday’s strangers’, to borrow Jürgen Habermas’s phrase, within the legal frameworks of Kamerun, then Cameroon, then the Federal Republic of Cameroon and finally the Republic of Cameroon.

Cameroonians have never been as Cameroonian as they have been since their colonisation by the Germans, the French and the British. It is therefore, above all, a commonly lived event—together with geography—that connects them.

‘Yesterday’s strangers’ and the work of history

The phenomenon is even more emblematic when considered alongside the construction of the notion of the ‘Negro’, which, as Fanon demonstrated, has meaning only in relation to the colonist: ‘The Negro, who has never been so Negro as since he has been dominated by the white man … realises that history imposes upon him a precise terrain, that history indicates to him a precise path’ (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 202). If there is an essence, an invariant since the 1960s, it has a history. That history, combined with geography, imposes upon Cameroonians a precise terrain, a precise ‘essence’.

The phrase ‘yesterday’s strangers’ may seem excessive to those who regard the country as a natural essence rather than the result of historical forces. It appears self-evident to them that their ancestors, great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and they themselves have spent their entire lives in the same country.

Yet one must go back two centuries in African history, and at least to 1885, to understand that African states are populated by ‘yesterday’s strangers’ and that the political question consists in thinking through the conditions of their coexistence—or their common nationality.

The lesson of Papua New Guinea

Instead of tracing the history of every people centuries backwards, it is useful to revisit the evolution of Papuan society in New Guinea between 1931—the date of its ‘discovery’ by Australian anthropologists—and 2006, as Jared Diamond did in The World Until Yesterday. Recalling his 2006 return to a country he had already visited dozens of times, he describes people whose faces resembled those photographed at the 1931 ‘first contact’, even though they were their children or grandchildren.

The most immediately visible difference was clothing. In 1931, New Guinea Highlanders wore little more than grass skirts, net bags and bird-feather headdresses; in 2006, they wore the international clothing of shirts, trousers, hats, skirts, shorts and baseball caps. Within one or two generations—and within the individual lives of many people in the airport hall—the Highlanders had learned to write, use computers and fly aircraft. Some may have been the first people in their tribe to learn reading and writing. Diamond saw that generational gap embodied by a young pilot leading his grey-haired grandfather to the older man’s first flight.

But the transformation went far beyond clothing. The Highland societies of 1931 lacked not only manufactured garments and modern technologies—from clocks and telephones to credit cards, computers, escalators and aircraft—but also writing, metal, money, schools and centralised government. Without knowledge of the recent outcome, one might have wondered whether a society without writing could truly master it in a single generation.

The 2006 airport crowd also brought together people who could not have assembled in 1931: tall, narrow-faced and lightly bearded southerners; shorter, broad-faced and bearded Highlanders; and islanders and northern lowlanders with features resembling those of Asians. A crowd that initially appeared ‘homogeneous’ to an inexperienced Westerner was highly diverse.

A linguist would have heard dozens of languages from very different groups: tonal languages in which pitch distinguishes words, as in Chinese; Austronesian languages with relatively simple syllables and consonants; and non-tonal Papuan languages. In 1931, speakers of several languages might meet, but never speakers of dozens of languages in one gathering. English and Tok Pisin, or Neo-Melanesian Pidgin English, were widely used at the 2006 check-in counter; in 1931, conversations in the Highlands took place in local languages, each confined to a small area.

The historical making of Cameroon

The processes described by Diamond undeniably operated within the societies geographically bounded by Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria that became part of Cameroon from 1885: the unprecedented gathering of North, South, East and West in one political space; the contraction of dialectal multilingualism; the acceleration of monolingualism in the colonial language; and, in the background, the driving force of plantation and manufacturing capitalism.

Cameroon is the product of a history. Every country necessarily results from historical forces. Some are external—as is readily imagined in Cameroon’s case, since the territory passed from German possession to French trusteeship, and the population’s rejection of that transition culminated in a terrible war of independence. Other forces are internal, though the amnesia maintained by Cameroon’s successive regimes scarcely allows us to imagine them.

Yet Cameroon’s existence, however contingent and historical, cannot be reduced to the geographical boundaries drawn by colonial cartographers. It is also a national identity that refers us to a work of the mind: the long struggle to create and appropriate a national identity. In Habermas’s terms, Cameroon is the product of the struggle to overcome the condition of ‘yesterday’s strangers’.

Freedom as a founding event

What created the Cameroonian nation, then, was the shared history written in the forests and savannahs. It was the ‘whirlwind of centuries’ carved into those places. And those neighbouring places themselves nourished the best that Cameroonians could hope for.

Sixty years later, one may say that forests, savannahs, mountainsides and the banks of rivers and streams were the sites of a ‘mysterious laying’. They incubated the egg of freedom that made Cameroon the country it is.

Cameroon cannot be understood while ignoring the place occupied there by the quest for freedom. Not all Cameroonians cherished freedom and not all were freedom fighters. Yet the demand for freedom—a local fact carried by a crushed minority and maintained over the significant period from 1945 to 1970—acquired a transcendental dimension.

For this reason, the political history from 1945 to 1960 has the value of an event. Every event leaves a trace long after it has disappeared.

The eloquence of the improbable event

Milan Kundera writes that an event is all the more significant and charged with meaning when it results from a great number of coincidences. What occurs by necessity, what is expected and repeated every day, remains mute. Only chance speaks, because we try to read in it—as fortune-tellers read the patterns left by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup, or as diviners in my region interpret events from the positions taken by sticks at the entrance to the hole of ngambi the spider—the figures of meaning.

An event is therefore all the more improbable when it presupposes a greater superimposition of coincidences. Those accumulated coincidences speak because only they allow us to measure and debate the event’s improbable character (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1987, p. 76, cited by Bernard Sève, Méthodes, Textes et savoirs, 2017).

Independence as the nation’s shared mystique

The struggle for freedom shaped the Cameroonian nation. Ruben Um Nyobè and his comrades summed it up masterfully before the United Nations on 17 December 1952, in the name of all Cameroonians: the immediate reunification of Cameroon, the creation of a Governing Council and a legislative Assembly, and the setting of a deadline for granting independence to the Cameroonian people.

That demand created solidarity among ‘yesterday’s strangers’, who now live in the same country despite their differences. This solidarity was forged in the struggle for immediate independence and reunification.

With hindsight, it is easy to understand that the war in the English-speaking regions fundamentally confronts two visions of independence. Independence, freedom and sovereignty are equivalent, as Patrice Lumumba once affirmed in his farewell letter to his wife: ‘Every Congolese must accomplish the sacred task of rebuilding our independence and our sovereignty, for without dignity there is no freedom, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.’

Independence is a synthetic construction. It is the synthesis of imagination that enabled the heroes of independence to unify intellectually the diversity of peoples. Even today, it reduces attachment to tribe, language and the traditions of each region of our countries to a tolerable level.

Yesterday as today, the mystique of independence is the only force capable of overcoming dispersion and resisting separatism. It transcended the diversity of Cameroonians and structured the thought of every political actor—including, curiously, the opponents of independence.

Excerpt from Antoine Nguidjol, Cameroun, la nation en péril, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2021.

Note: Habermas undoubtedly uses here the anthropological category through which traditional societies apprehend the Other: the enemy, or the non-brother.