(An Invitation to Anglophone Cameroon Diasporans)
By Mwalimu George Ngwane
Kwame Nkrumah’s battle-cry of “Seek ye first the political kingdom……..” is as relevant today as it was when he made this proclamation fifty years ago. But so are Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution movement and Emperor Meiji Tenno’s (Mutsuhito) endogenous industrialisation principle that drastically transformed the political statehoods of China and Japan respectively into the superpowers that they are today.
The Anglophone struggle in Cameroon has, in the main, been a political manifesto aimed at reasserting the statehood of Southern Cameroon, West Cameroon or Anglophone Cameroon, appellations that depend on the generational shift or liberation mind-set of the advocates.
From Gorji Dinka to Chief Ayamba through Elad-Munzu-Anyangwe and Albert Mukong, the search for a statehood among Anglophone Cameroonians both at home and in the Diaspora has been political; of course the very construction and deconstruction of that statehood was political having been subjected to the historical experiences of Southern Cameroon, West Cameroon state and today mere provincial spaces. This political mutation of the Anglophone Cameroonian points to one constitutional travesty – the degeneration of a viable nation from a constitutional political entity to a parochial and colonial linguistic definition and also to a malleable geographical delimitation. In spite of the controversy and even conspiracy in charting a common political vision among the Anglophones themselves, many have laid down their lives for the cause of an ante-1972 status quo. Unperturbed by the annual October intimidations and sporadic incarcerations, others continue to make their voices heard on what has come to be known as “the Anglophone problem”.
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