Cameroon: The Perverse Illusion of Media Pluralism

The paradox of abundant yet vulnerable media

At first sight, Cameroon enjoys remarkable media pluralism. Its print press abounds, local radio stations and private television channels have multiplied since the 1990s, and digital platforms create the illusion of unhindered speech. To an outside observer, this profusion might appear to prove democratic vitality and press freedom comparable to that of Western countries.

A closer look reveals a paradox: Cameroonian democracy is hardly dynamic. It remains among the most fragile on the African continent. How, then, can such symbolic vitality emerge from a democracy in crisis?

The answer is clear: if media freedom were the consequence of democracy, it could not prosper within a context of political disintegration.

Unlike Europe, where press freedom was won through fierce struggles—against monarchical censorship in seventeenth-century England, during the French and American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, and later through case law protecting journalists against arbitrary state power—Cameroon experienced no such creative conflict.

We must acknowledge that press freedom in Cameroon was not wrested from power by civil society. It was granted by those in power within an externally imposed democratisation process that never excluded either the state of exception or repression. Cameroonian journalists are still regularly threatened, imprisoned and sometimes murdered, as Martinez Zogo was.

Far from embodying the ‘fifth estate’ of genuinely democratic regimes, journalism in Cameroon operates in a space where proclaimed freedom coexists with the extreme vulnerability of its principal defenders: free thinkers and practitioners from every background.

A freedom imposed from above

Media freedom in Cameroon belongs to the dynamic generated by the multidimensional collapse of Francophone African states at the turn of the 1990s. The collapse was not merely economic—falling public revenue and chronic indebtedness—but also social and political: unpaid salaries, repeated strikes, student movements, trade-union protests and the loss of legitimacy of existing regimes.

The 1990 La Baule summit was the founding act of media freedom in Cameroon. François Mitterrand made French aid conditional upon the adoption of multiparty politics, freedom of the press and the signing of structural adjustment programmes with the IMF and the World Bank.

The ‘democratisation’ of African regimes thus became a political condition of international aid. Cameroon then adopted multiparty politics, launched massive privatisations of public enterprises, opened its banking system and authorised private newspapers and audiovisual channels.

It would be unfair to deny that domestic demands preceded these decisions. From the 1980s, journalists gathered around Pius Njawé’s Le Messager and L’Effort camerounais, lawyers including Yondo Black, and University of Yaoundé students such as Symphorien Tonkam fought for greater freedom. Yet those struggles, often harshly repressed, never achieved a tangible victory.

Press freedom was therefore imposed not by victories in a struggle for liberty, but by an external political decision relayed by the Cameroonian state. The same may be said of multiparty politics and, more broadly, Cameroonian ‘democracy’.

Press freedom in Cameroon is consequently not the expression of popular conquest, but a constrained adaptation to the formalism of Western democracy, applied ‘to the letter’ by Francophone African states anxious to retain the support of financial and diplomatic partners. This formalism was less a social project than an institutional appearance intended to reassure international donors.

This origin explains the inherent perversity of current media freedom. What begins as a strategic concession retains an instrumental function: serving power, fragmenting opinion and neutralising the public sphere, even under the attractive appearance of pluralism.

Freedom directed towards fragmentation

From its very beginning, Cameroonian media freedom was not designed to build a national public sphere, but to prevent one. The multiplication of newspapers and channels chiefly fragmented opinion, as each medium aligned itself with particular political, religious, economic or ethnic interests.

Le Messager, founded by Pius Njawé and long regarded as the symbol of an independent press, was marginalised as newspapers more directly connected to political parties or regional elites gained ground. Mutation and La Nouvelle Expression temporarily embodied a critical press, but their audiences remained limited and highly exposed to economic pressure. Cameroon Tribune, by contrast, operates as an official state mouthpiece and publishes content calibrated to legitimise the government.

The same phenomenon occurs in broadcasting. Vision 4, financed by political elites close to the regime, specialised in defending the government and stigmatising the opposition. Douala-based Equinoxe TV presents itself as an opposition medium, yet its content often reflects political and regional polarisation, appearing to serve clienteles as much as it structures national debate. In the religious sphere, channels such as STV and certain denominational radio stations provide platforms for pastors and church leaders, further fragmenting spaces of speech.

Political and religious polarisation is compounded by ethnic and regional fragmentation. In the North-West and South-West, local newspapers and radio stations echo Anglophone movements and are often perceived as instruments of identity claims as much as political struggle. In Douala, some outlets reflect the positions of Sawa economic elites, while many Yaoundé media remain aligned with central-power networks dominated by Beti elites. Rather than fostering a common public sphere, this media geography duplicates and crystallises the country’s regional and identity fractures.

Cameroonian public opinion is consequently split into media archipelagos. Each group recognises its own ‘truth’ in newspapers or channels matching its political, religious, ethnic or regional affinities. Instead of unifying society, media pluralism maintains a cacophony in which citizens no longer encounter common information, but only competing and sometimes irreconcilable interpretations.

From pluralism to clientelism

As shown above, every Cameroonian press outlet depends upon proximity to a ‘patron’: a political party, religious group, company or regional elite. In return, it defends that patron’s interests, offers visibility and disseminates its narratives.

Pierre Bourdieu showed that even in the West the journalistic field obeys the logics of competition and profitability. In Cameroon, however, that logic becomes extreme: media organisations survive through clientelist loyalty. Information becomes a currency of exchange; freedom becomes an institutionalised dependency.

Consent is not manufactured by one dominant medium

In Cameroon, consent is no longer produced by one dominant medium, as Cameroon Tribune or CRTV once did, but by an extreme and uncontrolled diversity of outlets which, through capillary action, converge towards a single dominant point.

That common point is not a shared viewpoint, but a common condition of levelling that may be compared with the Aristotelian concept of disposition, diathesis. By placing its discourse on the same level as all others, each medium contributes to a general equalisation of narratives: everything is equivalent and nothing can be ranked.

For the attentive observer, competition between Cameroonian newspapers does not generate fruitful emulation. Instead, it produces mutual debasement, stagnant stability and an obstacle to progress. If media possess a formal unity—as a specific professional activity and a literary genre—it is not a dynamic unity of meaning, but a unity of powerlessness.

A literary genre without a common work

If the press is treated as a literary genre in its own right—with writing codes such as reporting, editorials and interviews; stylistic rules such as striking headlines, information hierarchies and a rhetoric of objectivity; and an expected purpose of informing, warning and denouncing—then Cameroonian media do share a formal unity.

Their production resembles a ‘media literature’ based on repetitive narrative devices: turning a scandal into a plot, dramatising political crises, manufacturing enemies and heroes, and alternating denunciation with justification. This generic dimension gives the media a recognisable professional identity and a common language distinguishing them from other forms of social discourse.

Yet this generic unity carries no dynamic of meaning. In Cameroon, multiplying journalistic narratives does not lead towards collective coherence; it produces a prose of dispersion. Each outlet tells its own story of the country in the voice of its patron, clientele or reference group. The logic of the genre—writing, commenting and investigating—survives, but emptied of critical capacity.

What appears to be a stable literary genre therefore proves to be a genre without a common work: an endless repetition of journalistic forms neutralising one another. This is a ‘unity of powerlessness’: the media share the same codes, but not the same horizon of truth.

Micro-regimes of truth as a technology of power

The perverse effect is clear: this ‘unity of powerlessness’, and the inability to rank, classify and criticise, cause a general atrophy of writing and public judgement.

It is fortunate that Cameroonian citizens no longer confront a truth imposed from above by a ‘knowing state’. Yet they now face a multitude of ‘truths’ that neutralise one another and are deliberately manufactured solely to neutralise other ‘regimes of truth’.

The result is an immense cacophony and its disastrous moral and civic consequences: general indifference and an inability to form a national consciousness.

Michel Foucault reminded us that apparent freedom of thought may conceal an insidious ‘technology of power’.

In Cameroon, the regime of truth is no longer tied to a centralised medium. It is fragmented into micro-regimes of truth that neutralise one another.

This dispersion is part of a technology of power. Power lies in the dispersal of media and narratives, not in their centralisation.

Fragmentation as a Cameroonian manufacture of consent

In his analysis of the ‘manufacture of consent’, Noam Chomsky shows how Western media homogenise opinion by becoming mass media and repeating the same discourse without limit. This analysis is valid, although it remains, in my view, tied to a specific Western configuration of capital: the concentration of media production in the hands of a few dominant actors.

That logic does not correspond to African media realities, particularly in Cameroon. Here, consent is manufactured not by massification and monopoly, but through the organised fragmentation of the media field. Paradoxically, dispersion serves power: a people divided into archipelagos of opinion lacks the intellectual resources to create a common representation or oppose the existing state of affairs.

Fragmenting representations strengthens political power instead of weakening it. In a splintered media landscape, no narrative can establish itself as a common reference. Each controversy displaces the previous one and every proclaimed truth is immediately relativised by a counter-truth. Political power is thereby always removed from blame: it no longer needs to censor; it need only allow proliferation.

Martinez Zogo and the neutralisation of scandal

The murder of journalist Martinez Zogo in January 2023 could have marked a turning point, a scandal grave enough to shake the regime. Yet the profusion of media narratives produced the opposite effect. Every channel and newspaper proposed its own interpretation: a political assassination for some, a financial settling of scores for others, and a mere ‘blunder’ for still others.

The absence of a shared interpretive framework transformed an alleged state crime into a media enigma in which noise stifled truth.

The Anglophone crisis and corruption cases

The same mechanism shaped coverage of the Anglophone crisis. Since 2016, newspapers and television channels have multiplied contradictory analyses: separatist rebellion, foreign manipulation, humanitarian crisis or identity question.

Instead of nourishing national debate, this plurality reinforced regional divides. Each camp drinks from its own media sources, making confrontation between narratives impossible. Rather than clarifying the conflict, information ethnicises it.

Major corruption cases—Operation Sparrowhawk, misappropriation of Covid-19 funds, and scandals involving SONARA or CRTV itself—meet the same fate: loud indignation followed by fragmented discourse. Each medium adopts its patron’s or clientele’s perspective and reduces the affair to a localised quarrel. The scandal evaporates in the tumult and no public consciousness forms.

A machine for neutralising events

These examples show how media pluralism, instead of producing a counter-power, operates as a machine for neutralising events. The regime is protected not by a lack of information, but by an overabundance of mutually neutralising narratives. With too many competing accounts and interpretations, opinion becomes lost and power endures.

Where a unified and combative press might have formed a counter-power, Cameroon’s media cacophony neutralises every critical impulse. One outlet’s excess provokes another’s response; indignations cancel one another; scandals lose their force for want of sustained transmission. The regime benefits from this dispersion and advances untroubled, while each camp speaks only to its faithful.

‘A freedom that is granted does not emancipate: it controls by other means.’

In summary, media freedom in Cameroon is a perverse instrument for neutralising freedom. Instead of liberating people, it binds them to the sociopolitical determinisms that prevent them from living as genuinely free citizens.

References

François Mitterrand, La Baule speech, 20 June 1990.

Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits II, Paris, Gallimard, 2001, pp. 158–160.

Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, Paris, Liber-Raisons d’agir, 1996.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988.