West Cameroon Chiefs And The Gallic Tongue

In the Monday, December 8 issue of this paper, I read, with a sense of dismay and lament, the belated protest of the Southwest Chiefs pronounced by one of theirs, Chief William Ekong, in the course of a meeting on managing local forest management committees, against the imposition of the Gallic tongue on them by the administration.

This, coming over 50 years after our conjugal with our East Cameroon brothers, is again a significant index on how far the union has fared, on the fortunes of one of the partners. The object of the Chiefs’ indignation also pushes us to reflect on relationship between the traditional chieftaincy institution and the regime, especially from the watershed period of the early 1990 renaissance of political pluralism.

The first bitter lesson Chief Ekong’s outcry brings back to mind is that, for its half-century existence, from the iron-fist rule of the Ahidjo administration to the much varnished monocracy of his political godson, Dr. Biya, the Cameroon Government conceives and largely executes its policies and projects in French: political and administrative power in Cameroon speaks French. That is why one reads with a mixture of chagrin and mockery the Chief’s indignation at a Minister who claims to be an Anglophone “yet all the official documents” they get from his Ministry “are in French”.

This is not an isolated case of a Minister of West Cameroon origin being unable to have documents issued out of his department in English, his own official language; it is the pattern, the unwritten law of the procedures of Cameroon’s central administration.

Recall that as far back as 1964, Fonlon, the KNDP ideologue whose early conviction in the reunification cause pushed him to embark on an autodidactic study of French far back in the 1940s, and whose Oxford and Sorbonne training could enable him peer farther into the political horizon than his party peers, did send a strongly-worded protest to Ahidjo and his UC men against the marginalisation of their KNDP partner on the conception, formulation and execution of Government policy, and against the alarming rate of Frenchification being forced on West Cameroon.

Fonlon would later on be called by Ahidjo to Yaounde to eventually serve as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and head the Ministries of Health, and Posts and Telecommunications. Fonlon, despite his cosy relationship with Ahidjo, despite his strong case for an early bilingualism with English as first official language [a case completely ignored in his own native Cameroon but given serious thought by Canadians], would leave the Government in the early 70s with the various ministerial departments headed by Anglophones still largely sending official documents back to their West Cameroonian people in French.

We entered into the union with a West Cameroon House of Chiefs, an advisory institution which, if maintained and legally strengthened, might have evolved into a counter-power along the lines of parallel institutions like the press, the church and organised civil society, playing a salutary sentinel role on the wanted baneful excesses of the administration. With Ahidjo’s drive towards political absolutism and the attitude inherited from his French masters of dangling the carrot and the whip before native authorities with the ultimate aim of emasculating and trimming them down to puppets of the post-colonial administration, this institution was doomed to a rapid obliteration from the socio-political landscape.

When, without stopping to reflect on its implications, our traditional rulers eagerly embraced and paraded the pompous phrase, of French colonial origins and largely diffused in West Cameroon in the 70s by the Ahidjo regime, of chiefs, as auxiliaries of the administration, they themselves had unwittingly signed the death warrant of their institution as a moral counterforce to the post-colonial Cameroonian State; they had by this become puppets in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who could now make or mar their administrative destinies. It was a regrettable development because in other countries there had been veritable duels between the power hungry African autocrats and the custodians of traditional power.

Students of African history will instantly recall Obote against the Kabaka in Uganda and Nkrumah against the powerful Ashanti dynasty in Ghana. In many of these cases the reigning princes did triumph but in the long run the Chiefs would come out with their moral authority and the right to their opinions on certain State domains restored.

The situation here might have positively evolved had the Chiefs taken advantage of the dynamic socio-political climate of the early 1990s to seriously articulate and demand an assertive charter for the revered traditional institution. In our context, it deserves one, for, except for some recent chieftaincies which were perhaps the creation of the colonial mission, many traditional rulers sit on thrones which are far older than the State of Cameroon.

But what did we behold? Many chiefs who, in the Ahidjo days had steered clear of the lone CNU political domain, overnight were transformed into CPDM lackeys. In the process they belittled themselves fighting and losing political battles against their own subjects who had hitherto simply revered them. We thus saw traditional rulers, pilloried by their own very subjects: recall the case of one of them who was pelted with rotten tomatoes by market women along the Commercial Avenue in Bamenda. We heard of traditional rulers who set up local gestapos with torture chambers in their palaces, and there dragged political opponents to walk the brinks of the valley of the shadow.

By the close of the 90s, the traditional rulers had thus largely played a preponderant role in dragging this once venerable institution into mud. Recall that it took the signature of Douala chiefs for the Germans to ultimately carve out much of what we have today as Cameroon. Recall that Douala Manga Bell, Martin Paul Samba, the intrepid Kuva Likenye and many others shed their blood asserting the right of their people in the face of German domination and oppression. That their post-colonial inheritors should, because of base pecuniary manipulations, now find themselves weakly gesticulating before a Frankeinstein system which was erected partly thanks to their pliant and cupid attitudes, is the sort of painful ironies that are wont to mark our sordid political landscape.