Something is going down in Cameroon between the English and French speaking Cameroonians

[Samori Toure]

English speaking Southwestern Cameroon might be moving towards independence from French speaking Cameroon. Whether Southwestern Cameroon seeks to realign with Nigeria like the English speaking Northwestern Cameroonians did in 1961 is another issue.

From a genetics standpoint unless I am mistaken I think that DNA testing is taking African Americans back to the Southwestern grassland region in Cameroon, specifically to the Tikar people (Bamileke, Bamoun etc). It also looks like the oil producing sector in Cameroon is in the English speaking regions. If I got any part incorrect, the please correct my entries.


Biafra and Southern Cameroons might 'join forces to achieve independence'
Southwest Region (Cameroon) - Wikipedia
Bamenda - Wikipedia
Cameroonian Americans - Wikipedia

 

[BigMan]

Idk how to feel about this especially when I saw a pic of English speaking camerounians protesting wearing those cac wigs

Also idk about joining Nigeria when folks are talking about leaving

 

[Samori Toure]

Idk how to feel about this especially when I saw a pic of English speaking camerounians protesting wearing those cac wigs

Also idk about joining Nigeria when folks are talking about leaving

I know what you mean. The whole slavery/colonial master language fight is very weird. If one of the languages had to be chosen then you would think that it would be English, because that is the international language of business. However, both are foreign to Africans and I wouldn't be fighting anybody to keep either one.

Another thing that I am confused about is that the Francophone African Nations are still paying the French a tax for Colonization and Slavery. That is completely outrageous. That should be grounds right there to break with France and renounce the teaching of French.

14 African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax For the Benefits of Slavery and Colonization | SiliconAfrica
How France loots its former colonies - This Is Africa
French colonial tax still enforce for Africa - World Bulletin
14 African Nations Being Forced By France to Pay Taxes for the 'Benefits' of Colonialism - Atlanta Black Star

 

[BigMan]

I know about the tax but I'm not knowledgeable enough about francophone Africa to comment much

However French is the largest growing language there with the exception of Wolof in Senegal

 

[MajorVitaman]

Man wtf

 

[Red Shield]

I know what you mean. The whole slavery/colonial master language fight is very weird. If one of the languages had to be chosen then you would think that it would be English, because that is the international language of business. However, both are foreign to Africans and I wouldn't be fighting anybody to keep either one.

Another thing that I am confused about is that the Francophone African Nations are still paying the French a tax for Colonization and Slavery. That is completely outrageous. That should be grounds right there to break with France and renounce the teaching of French.

14 African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax For the Benefits of Slavery and Colonization | SiliconAfrica
How France loots its former colonies - This Is Africa
French colonial tax still enforce for Africa - World Bulletin
14 African Nations Being Forced By France to Pay Taxes for the 'Benefits' of Colonialism - Atlanta Black Star

france votes for le pen and that's the perfect time/reason to throw that french yoke into the


But anyway they should bush french in general. And switch over to english, if they have to absolutely use a foreign language. English is the international language. And they should speak whatever indiginous language that's the most used in their country.

 

[BigMan]

But anyway they should bush french in general. And switch over to english, if they have to absolutely use a foreign language. English is the international language. And they should speak whatever indiginous language that's the most used in their country.

Not that simple

Most of those nations have no clear ethnic majorities. French is what unites them

 

[Samori Toure]

Not that simple

Most of those nations have no clear ethnic majorities. French is what unites them

French can't be that unifying in Cameroon if the French speaking Cameroonians and the English speaking Cameroonians have beef. Btw, this might be deeper than we thought. I looked up a video on Bamenda, which is in the English speaking section of Cameroon and the video discussing the town is in French.



I read the comments and looked at other videos and as we might imagine the issue is much deeper than we thought. The issue seems to be about federalism. The Biya government has rid itself of it and he seems to favor the French speakers for government jobs and contracts over the English speakers. And he is appointing French speaking administrators over English speaking region as a way to oppress the English speakers. Moreover, the government is pushing French teachers upon English speakers and thereby not hiring English teachers. Also the laws written in French and English seem to have some difference. This issue seems to go back to the Anglophone sections of Cameroon being more closely aligned with Nigeria.

This seems to go back to the Anglophone sections choosing not to align with and be a part of Nigeria.

 

[Yehuda]

This issue seems to go back to the Anglophone sections of Cameroon being more closely aligned with Nigeria.

This seems to go back to the Anglophone sections choosing not to align with and be a part of Nigeria.

?

 

[Samori Toure]

?

The English speaking sections of modern Cameroon were English colonies that were aligned with and administered out of Nigeria and the administration of British Cameroon was out of Lagos.

Mass protests in Cameroon are exposing the fragility of its dual French-English system

In 1960 the English speaking Cameroons were given a vote as to whether to join Nigeria or join Cameroon. The areas in red (English) in the third and fourth box shows what Cameroon looked like before the vote. The Northern English speakers in Cameroon (mostly Muslim) chose to join Nigeria, while the Southern English speakers in Cameroon (mostly Christian) chose to join French Cameroon (in the Blue), which is box 5 and 6. Of course there is a lot of oil in the English speaking section of Cameroon.

British Cameroons - Wikipedia

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

Cameroon is virtually a French colony.

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

This article details the crimes of the French in Cameroon and how they murdered their liberation leader:
The Forgotten Cameroon War | Jacobin

Cameroon’s liberation movement leaders could only be honored clandestinely, out of sight of security forces as brutal as they were omnipresent. French and Cameroonian authorities worked in tandem to enforce this vast enterprise of repression and concealment, successfully silencing even the most daring of the exiled oppositionists. In 1972, the French government censored French Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti’s Main basse sur le Cameroun, the first work describing the atrocities of the independence war. The French government immediately banned it and destroyed all available copies.

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

The suppression of the UPC and its militia turned into open war. The military authorities deployed various large-scale military measures — like the Pacification Zone (ZOPAC) set up in Sanaga-Maritime at the end of 1957 — against the nationalists. Like the British in Malaya and Kenya and like the Americans later in Vietnam, the French began a process of so-called villagization. Security forces under French command mercilessly hunted down all those who refused to join military regroupment camps. The French army and its affiliated militias burned illegal villages and summarily executed outlaws extrajudicially. Those who joined the regroupment camps, willingly or not, had to experience the army’s total surveillance apparatus, endure endless screening sessions, and take part in countless psychological rehabilitation schemes.

We will probably never know the exact number of people massacred during these “cleansing operations.” We do know that the UPC’s charismatic Um Nyobè — a priority target — was one of the victims. A comrade was tortured until she revealed Um Nyobè’s location, and a military patrol quickly assassinated the nationalist leader.

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

The war spread beyond the Sanaga-Maritime region. The “troubles,” as the French authorities called them, affected all of southern French Cameroon, in particular the area from the port city of Douala to the coffee-growing Mungo and Bamileke regions. Because these regions bordered British southern Cameroon — where numerous UPC leaders had taken refuge — the French rebuked their British counterparts, accusing them of allowing their territory to be used by the nationalist combatants as a strategic withdrawal zone.

In 1957, under pressure from France — which did not hesitate to illegally enter its territory to carry out assassinations and who threatened to stir up trouble in its other colonies — the British expelled the main UPC leaders. Under the French secret services’ watchful eye, UPC president Félix Moumié and a dozen others began a long revolutionary journey, settling successively in Sudan, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, and later, in Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola — in any African country that would grant them asylum.

Independence as Colonization
The Cameroonian war also played out on the international stage — in particular at the United Nations. Immediately after Um Nyobè’s death, the French authorities announced the country’s imminent independence and offered to examine the best way forward. Presented as an act of generosity, independence in fact perfectly suited the French war plan.

From the Cameroonian perspective, the scheme had two obvious defects. For one, it called for independence prior to an election. For another, the Cameroonian leaders whom French authorities co-opted as allies had to sign a series of bilateral accords with Paris, some of them secret, that would legalize French control over the new state’s commercial, monetary, military, cultural, and diplomatic policies.

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

The French army repeated its villagization policy, set up militias, and disappeared prisoners. It added a vast campaign of aerial bombardment to its repertoire. The population endured intense psychological campaigns — torture was systematized, public executions proliferated, and the severed heads of alleged rebels were displayed at markets and public squares. In parallel, France intensified its hunt for exiled enemies. Félix Moumié, for instance, died in November 1960 after being poisoned in Geneva by an agent of the French secret services.

This policy of terror continued for a decade. Under the leadership of Ernest Ouandié — who returned to Cameroon after Moumié’s assassination — the ALNK displayed astonishing fighting spirit in spite of incredible material difficulties. The ferocious repression guided secretly by France started to bear fruit in 1962–63. The nationalist underground became more and more restricted, but did not disappear completely. It was only when Ouandié was arrested in 1970 and publicly executed in January 1971 that the nationalists accepted that armed struggle had definitively failed.

Over the course of the war, the government began routinely practicing the counterinsurgency methods innovated in the 1950s. Supervised by French advisers, Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo — installed in 1958 — transformed his regime into a dictatorship. Well aware that he owed his power to France, he suppressed all civil liberties and progressively established a one-party system. Under the pretext of fighting “subversion,” he surrounded the Cameroonian people with a wall of silence. With its omnipresent army, brutal political police, and administrative detention camps, the regime became one of the most repressive in Africa to the benefit of the local apparatchiks and French businesses, who shared in the profits from the country’s economic exploitation.

The French government was so satisfied by the result that it granted independence to its other African colonies along the same lines. Like Ahidjo, the leaders of these new, nearly all pro-France countries signed bilateral agreements drastically limiting their sovereignty and transformed their regimes into dictatorships. Those who refused were severely brought to task or eliminated, as in the case of the Togolese Sylvanus Olympio — assassinated in 1963 by French-trained putschists. Thus “Françafrique” was born — the French version of neocolonialism, which allowed Paris to maintain its former African colonies not in spite of independence but, in fact, thanks to it.