By Canute Tangwa
Should we as Anglophones celebrate in our own way fifty years of reunification come 2011? This was the question I put to Sam-Nuvala Fonkem, current Public Information Officer for ONUCI in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. He shot back: Is there cause to celebrate? No but we could showcase the best and brightest of Anglophone brains and brawn in various fields 50 years running. He retorted: but do not forget those who have brought us shame! Our collective psyche is the sum total of our good, our bad and our ugly.
Why in our own way? I have never had cause to call any newsroom in Cameroon to react to a publication. This I did when I stumbled on a copy of Les Cahiers De Mutations titled PALMARES - LES GRANDES FIGURES DU FOOTBALL CAMEROUNAIS (Février 2010). I got Emmanuel Gustave Samnick on the line and asked him whether the likes of Raymond Fobete, Mark Nibo, Peter Essoka, Zachary Nkwo, Michael Wacka and so on did not have a place in his publication. First, I was impressed with his sound knowledge of the actors in question. Then the usual you-see-we-had-to-make-do excuse because of space and…a firm promise that part two would come out soon!
On the socio-economic and political turf, Haman Mana's CES HOMMES QUI ONT MARQUE LES 50 ANS DU CAMEROUN in LE JOUR (2010) did not fare better. Amongst Anglophones, it singled out John Ngu Foncha but it was like a footnote because on the front page while Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya and a bunch of others had larger than life images, Foncha's almost blurred and sickly image is tucked in a small corner! A look at some of the persons who marked our independence would make the sincere wince!
We have to celebrate 50 years of reunification in our own way because nobody can sing our song or tell our story better than us; because we are better placed to give soul and meaning to what we believe in, went through and are going through; because in order to chart our new course we need to look back with pride and anger; because our youth has to know and inculcate the core values that made/make us a people apart; because by so doing we invariably admit our mea culpas and mea maxima culpas and thereby set the records straight; because we believed in reunification more than anyone else and since at 50 we still feel short-changed, it is our bounden duty to celebrate in our way and get back what is rightly ours.
We are barely a year shy of our fiftieth anniversary. How should we go about it? We do not need an All Anglophone Conference III or a Southern Cameroons roundtable. We no longer need to string our complaints for the attention of Yaounde. We need to empower ourselves without necessarily going to Yaounde cap in hand. We are in a global village and luckily for us we stand a better chance because we are not strangers to the precepts that bind the global village.
Follow my eyes!
At the knowledge empowerment level, one of the things we need is a compendium of Anglophone movers and captains in various fields of human endeavour for the past 50 years: politics, economy, education, judiciary, advocacy, sports, journalism, music, business, agriculture, military, police, penitentiary, administration (civil service), trade unionism, organised religion (catholic, protestant and Muslim), medicine, arts, sciences, traditional authority and so on. Thus, we would be able to read and assess part of our history through our personalities. A huge project but worth a try though. Can we give it a try?
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