Am I Anglophone? Identity politics and postcolonial trauma in Cameroon at war

Abstract

I was born in the English-speaking South West Province of Cameroon and raised in the English-speaking North West Province where I was educated in a system of primary through high school studies modeled on the British education system of G.C.E. Ordinary and Advanced Levels. After my A’ Levels, I moved to the French-speaking Centre Province where I enrolled at the University of Yaounde. There I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Licence ès Lettres Bilingues—a B.A. in Bilingual Letters (English and French)—for which I had to complete a French language immersion requirement in Douala in the French-speaking Littoral Province. After my university studies, I worked in the French-speaking West Province and English-speaking South West Province before moving to French/English-speaking Montreal, Canada where I studied Comparative Literature at McGill University and later immigrated to the United States. This essay, written in the context of the current “Anglophone Crisis” and the war taking place in Cameroon, is a personal meditation as a citizen, scholar, and fiction writer on the elusive nature of identity that the postcolonial nation-state seeks to capture, contain, and/or impose on the multiple “fragmented” selves of its citizens; identities that are by necessity in flux and as such either refuse to be contained within state-sanctioned acts of linguistic terrorism and/or restrained by socio-cultural and political repression.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for my summer residency at the center in 2019. Although my focus was on a different research project, I also used some of my time there to complete the revisions on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Name coined by Fongum Gorji Dinka in “The New Social Order” of 20 March 1985, who wrote this essay in reaction to President Paul Biya changing the name of the country from La République Unie du Cameroun/United Republic of Cameroon to La République du Cameroun/Republic of Cameroon.

2 Bole Butake was a renowned playwright, essayist, critic, and Professor Emeritus of Yaounde University I. In 1992, he wrote an open letter to Paul Biya titled “I Refuse to be Lapiroed,” published in Cameroon Post (No. 98), that made national and international news. Among other things, the letter chastised the government for its inability to engage in dialogue with its citizens and mocked its reliance on bribery and administrative posts to manage those it perceived as dissident. For more, see my interview with Butake in Tydskrif, pp. 22-23 and 29.

3 Interview conducted in Yaounde on March 29, 2015. He died on October 1, 2016.

4 See Pour le libéralisme communautaire (translated as Communal Liberalism, 1987) that was published two years after Ahmadou Ahidjo handed over power to Paul Biya. It is noteworthy, and by no accident, that a new revised and updated edition of Communal Liberalism (with an editorial note and Introduction) was published in 2018. In the September 12 online edition of Cameroon Tribune, Emmanuel quotes President Biya: “I will like to emphasise once more, from the depths of my conviction as a statesman and my attachment to republican ideals, and based on the ground we have covered together over the time I have spent listening to you and at your service, that salvation lies in jointly and severally building Cameroon to be a country that transcends ethnic groups, religious, professional, sexes, social conditions, generations and political leanings, to turn resolutely towards consolidating our living together and harmonious cohabitation with two action pillars.” Emmanuel further states, “This is the appeal of President Paul Biya in the new edition of his book, ‘Communal Liberalism’ that was presented in the Yaounde Hilton Hotel on September 12, 2018. President Biya in the last part of the 169-page book entitled ‘Appeal’ quoted the action pillars to include, ‘Opening up the society to liberal modernity and all its opportunities; and maintaining the momentum of fairness and social justice without which our edifice could be undermined’.”

5 Previous graduating classes of the Bilingual Degree program spent their third year abroad—Francophones in England and Anglophones in France—and then returned to complete their final year in Yaounde. My graduating class did not enjoy this privilege of language immersion in France and England. Anglophones of my graduating class were sent to Douala in a French-speaking province and Francophones to Bambili in an English-speaking province. Needless to say, we didn’t have the opportunity of interacting with native speakers of French and English, and in their local environments.

6 At none of the check points in French-speaking Cameroon were we asked to get off the bus for the “contrôle des pièces d’identitées.”

7 Nickname of the Rapid Intervention Battalion known as the BIR (Batallion d’intervention rapide), an elite special forces army unit. Thousands of these forces have been deployed in the Anglophone regions since 2017. Their presence was reinforced with the creation, by a presidential decree on February 21 2018, of the fifth RMIA (Région militaire interarmées). The RMIA5, with its command center in Bamenda, was specifically created for military operations in the North West and South West regions.

8 This paper was originally presented at the conference he organized on this theme at Case Western Reserve University on March 1, 2019.

9 Ironically, this is a question I am also asked on a regular basis in America even though I have lived in the United States for two-and-a-half decades.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi

Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the English Department, an Assistant Dean for Diversity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University, and a past president of the African Literature Association (2016–2017). She is the author of Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference, Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon, The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba, and co-editor of Reflections: An Anthology of New Work by African Women Poets with Anthonia Kalu and Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka. Her many other publications including book chapters, articles, short stories and poetry appear in edited books, scholarly journals and creative writing magazines. She has guest edited special issues of scholarly journals including Tydskrif vir Letterkunde and the Journal of the African Literature Association. She writes fiction under the pen name Makuchi.