World View

2026-03-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

The Master and Margarita (Full Film with subtitles).

2025-02-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

The Union Moujik

by Janvier Chando,

Euphoria for a "Revolution" and the Truth

2022-08-31T21:02:00.002-07:00

Saying the truth to those who need it the most often gets the wrong reception. Revolution is a science that those wanting to carry it out need to think it through, taking into account so many factors. No Western institution has a good grasp of it. The fine art of it was never developed in the West nor mastered there. Back in 1997, at a time that our SDF had more than 60% support in Cameroon and the system(Biya regime and France) was treating it with disdain, at a time that I was just back home, some of our people thought the SDF should pick up arms. Despite its popularity, the SDF lacked a national idea, a unifying ideology that all those who militated in, supported, sympathized with or led it could identify as a rallying or sobering source.

In a nutshell, a revolution needs more than just goal(s). Cameroon, whether as a whole or a part of it needed a unifying idea or ideal in the democratic/revolutionary phase meant to finally bring down the system. Hence the article below entitled " TERROR: POLITICAL WEAPON, SOCIAL INFECTION, DEHUMANISER:", meant as a caution, or call it a warning cry. That task of coming up with a unifying idea was close to completion before the insurrection in Anglophone Cameroon. Now, it requires a genius or a madman to reverse this descent into political lethargy and other things, which are all to the benefit of the French-imposed system that is almost comatose. In fact, the moribund system under the Biya regime is feeding off the growing anarchy and getting a lease of life from the degeneration in the regions West of the River Mungo called the Northwest and Southwest.

And it would be a difficult task in any national and civic-nationalist endeavor to dismantle the system without considerable participation of the land and peoples of the Northwest and Southwest regions. That can only happen with the Kamerunist (union-nationalists) and federalists, who are the majority West of the Mungo, exerting themselves and extending a hand to the other forces of change in the rest of Cameroon.

March 2019

I quit the SDF in 2002 when Fru Ndi led the SDF in betraying the ideals of the Cameroonian struggle to complete its unfinished liberation by openly collaborating with the Biya regime and the French-imposed system through the Fru Ndi/Ngwasiri pact with the system to accept the councils and 23 parliamentary (13%) seats the regime allowed the SDF to keep, even though the SDF was the most popular political party in the country. Those seats were predominantly in the Northwest, hence Fru Ndi helped the regime/system in the game plan to tag the SDF as a regional party or a Northwest party, a capitulation by the Fru Ndi mafia in the SDF that effectively killed the party as a national party and perceived successor of the historic UPC that the civic-nationalists who had joined the party projected it to be.

https://viewsnewcameroon.blogspot.com/2010/09/terror-political-weapon-social.html

Addressing the Grievances of the Anglophone Part of Cameroon and the Founding of "The New Cameroon"

2021-06-28T17:00:00.003-07:00

First Published on Sunday, November 27, 2016 by the blog "New Cameroon Views"

By Janvier Tchouteu

The disillusionment, frustration and anger of the peoples West of the River Mungo (former British Southern Cameroonians, former West Cameroonians)---native born and or indigenous (aboriginal) over the bad treatment they have been receiving in the hands of the usurper French-imposed system (the political establishment), a system that is not a reflection of the post-independence government their forefathers had in mind when they voted for independence through (re)unification with the former French Cameroun( that became La Republique du Cameroun---the Republic of Cameroun on January 01, 1960) is real, should not be taken lightly and should be addressed in a serious manner. The Biya regime, like its predecessor the Ahidjo regime, and the French-imposed system as a whole loses any sense of relevance for their gross mismanagement of the reunification and independence project, an outcome that is hardly surprising for people who never fought for, never campaigned for, and never supported the reunification and independence of the lands of the former German Kamerun (British Cameroons and French Cameroun).

Every opportunity to mitigate or resolve the grievances of Anglophone Cameroonians West of the River Mungo should be seized, even though Cameroonian civic-nationalists (union nationalists who honor our forefathers who fought and died for and who voted for the reunification and independence of the lands of the former German Kamerun), believe that an optimal resolution of the Anglophone problem would be realized under a New Cameroon where the anachronistic French-imposed system has been completely dismantled and where the original objectives of reunification and independence would be the cornerstone of building a Cameroon that is progressive, liberal, free, democratic, just and prosperous.

However, even as we set our sights on this optimal or partial solutions, even as we denounce the French-imposed establishment made up of French-puppets and their collaborators drawn from every region, ethnic group, religion, and linguistic entity; even as we oppose this establishment led and dominated in Cameroon by French-favored groups, we should always bear in mind the fact that the establishment is rejected by the vast majority in all the regions, ethnic groups, religions and linguistic entities in the land. That way, the fight to restore the full rights of the people of the former West Cameroon does not make it a fight between Anglophones and Francophones; that way, a rejection of the system does not mean Cameroonians hold the Beti-Fang peoples or the Fulani peoples responsible for the Biya and Ahidjo regimes; that way, the grievances of Cameroonians against France's underhanded control of Cameroon does not become translated into a perception of France as an enemy, but rather as a country with the potential of becoming Cameroon's best friend that got led by governments of bad faith that made it to fail to become a genuine partner, a France that only needs to turn things around and reconcile with a people whose open heart can even accommodate France as a "Brotherly Nation".

Such a prospect of founding this "New Cameroon" would require honesty, genuineness, and adherence to historical truths from all the parties. The French puppets in Cameroon would have to stop parlaying the distorted history of Cameroon that the anti-Cameroonian forces in the governments of France dished out for them to serve to the Cameroonian people, anti-people narratives that succeeded in brainwashing so many over the decades, lies that denigrated the noble and honorable sacrifices Cameroonian civic-nationalists made for the land's reunification and independence. And even the Anglophobes and Francophobes, and even the Anglophone nationalists and Francophone nationalists (minorities on both sides of the River Mungo) who do not cherish the original goals of reunification and independence would need to cease trying to make enemies out of Anglophone Cameroonians and Francophone Cameroonians.

It does not help when we make comparisons of Cameroon, whose situation is unique in the world, with other countries. Cameroon still has the potential to become the pride of Africa or the curse of the continent. The New Cameroon would become the model around which the future "New Africa would be built. Cameroon stands to become "The Light of Africa". We should not allow the detractors to take our eyes away from the source of that light---Union-Nationalism.

The Case of the former Southern Cameroons compared to Africa's other Sovereign Regions that became parts of other African States

2021-06-28T16:57:00.006-07:00

First Published on Monday, November 28, 2016 by the blog "New Cameroon Views"

As indicated before, Cameroon's case is unique...In the case of Quebec and Eritrea, they were incorporated into British Canada and Ethiopia respectively as "trophies of war", hence they could or can politely get out (through a plebiscite or referendum)---Quebec, or fight their way out---Eritrea. Eritrea did just that with the support of the new government of Ethiopia after the overthrow of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Britain simply brought South Sudan and Sudan together, two entities that had no history before as a single entity; and it had to take decades of war and millions of deaths for the international community led by the United States of America that was against the Islamist regime of Omar Bashir, to allow a referendum that allowed South Sudan to go its separate way. And of course, Zanzibar was a British protectorate (a protectorate which in modern international law, is a dependent territory that has been granted local autonomy and some independence while still retaining the sovereignty of a greater sovereign state. The United Kingdom never granted independence to Zanzibar because it never had sovereignty over Zanzibar. the UK simply ended the Protectorate and made provision for full self-government in Zanzibar as an independent country within the Commonwealth. It was the revolutionary government that came to power in Zanzibar a month after Zanzibar's independence by overthrowing the pro-British monarch that negotiated Zanzibar's union with Tanganyika, thereby forming a new country called Tanzania. So, Zanzibar could have stayed independent if it wanted to. Southern Cameroons never had that option.

The case in Africa you could have even compared to British Southern Cameroons’s was British Somaliland. Somalis, who had never been united before found their homeland even more divided into three Somali colonial territories (French Somaliland, Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland.) during the partition of Africa, and the rest as a part of Kenya (North-east Kenya) and Ethiopia (Ogaden). Italian Somaliland became a British Trust Territory, like British Cameroons (British Northern Cameroons and British Southern Cameroons) after World War 2, which Britain administered separately from its protectorate British Somaliland. The Legislative Council of British Somaliland passed a resolution in April 1960 requesting independence and union with the Trust Territory of Somaliland (the former Italian Somaliland), which was scheduled to gain independence on 1 July that 1960. The leaders of British Somaliland and the former Italian Somaliland met and agreed to form a unitary state. However, Britain ended its control over British Somaliland five days before the scheduled unification date, so that the territory was briefly independent as the State of Somaliland before uniting on July 01, 1960 with the Trust Territory of Somaliland (the former Italian Somaliland) to form the Somali Republic (Somalia).

Curiously enough, following the descend of Somalia into a failed state in the aftermath of the civil war that followed the 1977-1978 war against Ethiopia in its bid to unite Ogaden with the rest of Somalia, the exit from power of President Siad Barre, and the breakdown of the central government, a geopolitical entity emerged in May 1991, calling itself the “Republic of Somaliland”, and regarding itself as the successor to former British Somaliland as well as to the State of Somaliland (the short-lived independent state of five days). Yet no country or international organization recognizes it until today. There is no need to delve deeper into the Somalia quagmire. And there are tons of other nominally independent states that are still unrecognized today who sacrificed blood to secede from the dominant state they were a part of---Nagorny Karabakh, Transnistria, Donetsk People’s Republic, Lugansk People’s Republic, and until 2008 Abkhazia and South Ossetia (That Russia and a few countries recognized following the Russo-Georgian war) and Kosovo (recognized by many Western countries), but not by up to half of the world. These entities have control of their territories, standing armies, government, and other trappings, but are not recognized as such, hence are not connected to the internal financial systems, international trade, international legal system, the United Nationals, and its affiliated institutions, etc.

In a nutshell, the retarding establishment can only address the grievances of Cameroonians West of the Mungo piecemeal. But a true, fundamental, genuine and overall resolution of Cameroon’s No 1, minority problem is possible only in a New Cameroon, a New Cameroon that is possible after all the peoples of Cameroon, irrespective of religion, region, ethnicity or linguistic affiliation join hands and with all seriousness dismantle this French-imposed system that has kept all Cameroonians in a cesspool for close to six decades.

And truth be told, I think the Northwest region is the least conscious of that reality as its politicians confuse the population into continuing the embrace of conflicting forces that divide the ranks of exponents of change there, making them to strike blindly most of the time, so that the formidable energy that the region generates gets scattered instead of being fully galvanized and channeled to effect cooperation with other forces of change in Cameroon and in building the broader energy that can sweep this monstrous system out of power and realize the New Cameroon. We need to be critical and self-critical, we need to listen to the points of view of others, be open-minded, start calling a spade a spade and turn our backs away even from our family members and tribesmen who are helping to sustain the system in a symbiosis that is leading Cameroon to abyss. “Long Sense” is not the way forward. It is anachronistic in the cause to found the “New Cameroon” because its smacks of deception and dishonesty that a rational mind finds intolerable.

Results of 1961 Plebiscite in British Southern Cameroons on Joining the Independent Nigeria or the Independent La Republique du Cameroun (Culled)

2021-06-02T12:45:00.005-07:00

First published by the blog "New Cameroon Views" on Sunday, June 2018

Administrative Division of British Southern Cameroons

Result of 1961 Plebiscite in Southern Cameroons (From EA Aka, 2002, p.278)

Plebiscite district	Nigeria	Cameroun	Total	% for Cameroun
Victoria
· Southwest	2552	3756	6308	59.5
· Southeast	1329	4870	6199	78.6
· Northwest	4744	4205	8949	47
· Northeast	3291	9251	12542	73.8
Kumba
· Northeast	9466	11991	21457	55.9
· Northwest	14738	555	15293	3.6
· Southeast	6105	12827	18932	67.8
· Southwest	2424	2227	4651	47.9
Mamfe
· West	2039	8505	10544	80.7
· North	5432	6412	11844	54.1
· South	685	8175	8860	92.2
· East	1894	10177	12071	84.3
Total (SW)	54699	82951	137650	60.3
Bamenda · North	8073	18835	26908	70.0
· East	1822	17858	19680	90.7
· Central west	1230	18027	19257	93.6
· Central east	529	18193	18722	97.2
· West	467	16142	16609	97.2
· South	220	19426	19646	98.9
Wum
· North	1485	7322	8807	83.1
· Central	3644	3211	6855	46.8
· East	1518	13155	14673	89.7
· West	2137	3449	5586	61.7
Nkambe
· North	5962	1917	7879	24.3
· East	3845	5896	9741	60.5
· Central	5059	4288	9347	45.9
· South	7051	2921	9972	29.3
Total (NW)	43042	150640	193682	77.8
Total (Southern Cameroons	97741	233591	331332	70.5

Euphoria for a "Revolution" and Truth

2021-05-12T21:12:00.003-07:00

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Advocates for a revolution should never dismiss the aspect of "unintended consequences" arising from an abortive revolution, especially one that is not well formulated. The SDF at the time was different things to different peoples. It was “na wya party" in different senses (tribal, linguistic, ethnic, regional, national, etc)of the phrase, hence a recipe for the worst (the unleashing of the Pandora's box) in a situation where it engaged in an armed struggle against the system.

In a nutshell, a revolution needs more than just goal(s). Cameroon, whether as a whole or a part of it needed a unifying idea or ideal in the democratic/revolutionary phase meant to finally bring down the system. Hence the article below entitled " TERROR: POLITICAL WEAPON, SOCIAL INFECTION, DEHUMANISER:", meant as a caution, or call it a warning cry. That task of coming up with a unifying idea was close to completion before the insurrection in Anglophone Cameroon. Now, it requires a genius or a madman to reverse this descent into political lethargy and other things, which are all to the benefit of the French-imposed system that is almost comatose. In fact, the moribund system under the Biya regime is feeding off the growing anarchy and getting a lease of life from the degeneration in the regions West of the River Mungo called the Northwest and Southwest.

And it would be a difficult task in any national and civic-nationalist endeavor to dismantle the system without considerable participation of the land and peoples of the Northwest and Southwest regions. That can only happen with the Kamerunist (union-nationalists) and federalists, who are the majority West of the Mungo, exerting themselves and extending a hand to the other forces of change in the rest of Cameroon.

http://viewsnewcameroon.blogspot.com/2018/?zx=79080ab15a48bbab

https://viewsnewcameroon.blogspot.com/2010/09/terror-political-weapon-social.html

LES PATRIES ETHNIQUES (TRIBUS) AU CAMEROUN AUJOURD'HUI QUI ONT ÉTÉ DIVISÉES PAR LA PARTITION DU KAMERUN ALLEMAND

2021-05-11T13:35:00.002-07:00

Les groupes ethniques autochtones qui chevauchent les frontières des provinces ou régions du Cameroun anglophone et des provinces ou régions voisines du Cameroun francophone:

· Bafaw-Balong

· Balong-Bafaw

· Bakaka

· Bakossi

· Bali

· Bamileke

· Bamoun

· Barombi/Bankon/Bakoko/Basaa

· Banso

· Duala-Mungo

· Mungo-Duala

· Mambila

· Mbo(h)

· Ngemba (in the broader sense)

· Tikar (broader sense)

Janvier Tchouteu Publié pour la première fois le 8/11/13 14:41 sur le "Blog New Cameroon Views"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Map_of_the_Grassfields_languages.svg

Page 8 https://books.google.com/books?id=kSEBYzu9CMgC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.ethnologue.com/17/map/CM_w/

The GROWING POLITICAL CANCERS IN CAMEROON (Culled from New Cameroon News Blog)

2021-05-07T19:30:00.002-07:00

First Published on Friday, October 30, 2020

Most right-thinking Cameroonians know that the comprador Biya regime dominated by ethno-fascists who are using the playbook of the evil six-decade French-imposed system, which is directly responsible for the deaths of close to a million Cameroonians is a cancer haunting Cameroon and Cameroonians.

Pundits among these right-thinking Cameroonians know that the Ambazonian Group that hijacked — from the civic-nationalists (union-nationalists) and federalists in Anglophone Cameroon — the cause to right the wrongs against, or redress the grievances of the people of the former British Southern Cameroonians (former West Cameroon), began their armed confrontation with the evil system in a thuggish manner.

By Ambazonian Group, I mean those who want to undo the 1961 reunification of the former British Southern Cameroons and the former French Cameroun (the 1960-1961 La Republique du Cameroun) following the February 11, 1961, plebiscite where 70% of voters in British Southern Cameroons opted for the reunification path; by the Ambazonia Group, I mean the secessionists or separatists who are mostly those and the heirs of those who were against reunification in the 1961 plebiscite that brought about the geopolitical remerging of most of the lands of the former German Kamerun.

The critical analysts among these pundits that have been outspoken about the regime’s bloody methods, and that are concerned about the rapid metamorphosis of the hooliganism of Ambazonian forces into something deadlier and more anti-people — TERRORISM — were afraid that the growing blood-thirstiness and sense of impunity among some in the Ambazonian forces; the Ambazonian leadership’s lack of maturity in denouncing its claimed ROGUE ELEMENTS, in disciplining them and in being apologetic to the civilian population affected by their deadly actions, could make the Ambazonian project another cancer in the noble and deeply traumatized Cameroonian soul.

It is about time:

· the AMBAZONIAN LEADERSHIP comes out, condemns and put a stop to its supposedly “ROGUE ELEMENTS” that commit/committed atrocities against civilians

· the AMBAZONIAN LEADERSHIP states CATEGORICALLY, UNEQUIVOCALLY and EMPHATICALLY that its forces would never target “CIVILIANS” again, especially CHILDREN and SCHOOL STAFF, and most especially SCHOOL CHILDREN.

As a matter of fact, a growing number of critical analysts are beginning to consider or are already considering Ambazonian forces as another CANCER haunting Cameroon and Cameroonians, and a curse blighting our society west of the River Mungo in what are the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon.

My principal concern is for the overwhelming majority of Cameroonians on both sides of the River Mungo, the people of the reunited former German Kamerun that is today Cameroon, who are being haunted by the national cancer that is the Biya regime and the French-imposed system that has held Cameroon and Cameroonians hostage for the past six decades; my main concern is more especially for the people of the Northwest and Southwest regions that are doubly afflicted by the Biya regime/system, and the malignancy of Ambazonian forces who in their ANTI-PEOPLE actions are exhibiting abnormalities that are characteristic of cancer on society.

And what has also been observed is that while the Biya regime appears to be making an effort to coat if not mitigate its state terrorism, especially in its utterances, the different Ambazonian Forces have increased their brazenness, to the point where one faction that accuses the other of carrying out the October 20, 2020, Kumba School Attack that left more than half a dozen schoolchildren dead, has the chutzpah to threaten the lives of Anglophone Pan-Cameroonian politicians who besides condemning the attack, chided the collective Ambazonian organization for the errors of their ways. Such threats tell us that the impulse to commit acts of terrorism spreads across the different Ambazonia factions, and that there are some in the Ambazonia leadership who do not find the prospect of a conflict between “Ambazonians” and the of rest Anglophone Cameroonians or the population in the Northwest and Southwest regions as something scary if not horrifying.

The focus of Cameroonians, especially its genuine patriots, is to set off a process that would found “THE NEW CAMEROON” by dismantling the anachronistic French-imposed system, redressing the grievances of Cameroon’s different stakeholders and putting in place an efficient framework within which the interests, security, development, prosperity, and dignity of Cameroonians would be guaranteed and safeguarded.

By genuine patriots, I mean those and the heirs of those who participated in the struggle or campaign for the reunification and independence of the territories of the former German Kamerun, those who cherish the ideals of Cameroon's true heroes; I mean those who abhor the fact that the country is being held hostage by those and the heirs of those who did not participate or support the cause for the country’s reunification and independence (the minority-rule Ahidjo/Biya regimes that was/were given power by usurper France, and the anti- reunificationists who voted to join Nigeria in the 1961 plebiscite in British Southern Cameroons).

I am using the words genuine patriots because the beneficiaries of the Biya regime and the anti-Cameroonian French-imposed system who are parasitic on Cameroon, the compradors who are in power against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Cameroonians, and who were put and are being maintained in power by the imperialistic French political establishment (responsible for crushing Cameroonian patriots that it cornered into picking up arms to defend the cause for Cameroon’s reunification and independence in the 1950s and 1960s) are now usurping the adjective “CAMEROONIAN PATRIOTS”. They have wrapped themselves with the Cameroonian flag and are presenting themselves as the force trying to keep Cameroon together, when in reality they baited and cornered “AMBAZONIANS” (the Anglophone Cameroonians who voted or are the heirs of those who voted for reunification with Nigeria and against reunification with the former French Cameroun in the 1961 plebiscite in British Southern Cameroons) into picking up arms after failing to redress the grievances of the English-speaking part of Cameroon.

We find today that Cameroon is a country possessed by these so-called patriots of the system, PSEUDO-PATRIOTS or ZOMBIE-PATRIOTS whose ethno-fascism is coated in a twisted form of HATE-DRIVEN-NATIONALISM that sustains its strength by tapping the collaboration of individuals in other groups in Cameroon based on individual interests, and not on the COLLECTIVE CAMEROONIAN INTERESTS, the national interest that every country with a sense of direction cannot do without. The Pseudo-Patriots are parasitic on Cameroon and are prepared to pay any price to cling to power to the point of making Cameroon a failed state.

There is no humanly acceptable rationale for the continued existence of the Biya regime, the “Ambazonia Project”, the support of the foreign powers that backed the anachronistic system for the sake of “FIGHTING COMMUNISM” during the COLD WAR. These great democracies must not continue to be part of Cameroon’s problems, but should rather transform themselves into part of Cameroon’s solution by not only acknowledging the fact that their favorites in Cameroon are leading Cameroonians down the road of dehumanization, but by also heeding the fact that their puppets in power in Cameroon are leading the Cameroonian people and Cameroon into the abyss.

Even as Cameroonians call on the foreign powers to place their loyalty to the Cameroonian people, the vast majority of whom reject the Biya regime and the system put in place by France in 1956, they are also repulsed by the atrocities and barbarity of the armed groups in Cameroon, and are dismayed by Cameroon’s “Establishment Politicians” and “so-called Opposition” who after having convinced themselves that entrenched interests would not allow the “NEW CAMEROON” to be born, now make politicking a business, thereby contributing to the moribund system in the country known as "Africa in Miniature" and the "Microcosm of Africa".

It is true that Cameroon is a messed-up country, messed up by internal factors, but more especially by the legacy of colonialism, partition, the cold-war, fascism, imperialism, neocolonialism, geopolitics and perhaps even more. That is why the “GREAT DEMOCRACIES “ of the West who cannot absolve themselves of their fair share of blame in the Cameroon quagmire, have the moral responsibility to work with the progressive forces of the land to set up a time table that would “DISMANTLE THE ANACHRONISTIC ETHNO-FASCIST SYSTEM” before the end of 2021 and establish “THE NEW CAMEROON” that would be the perfect reflection of the 28 Fundamental Principles of the United States of America’s Founding Fathers, especially the principle which states that “All mankind were created equal.”, by which those great minds meant that all mankind are theoretically treated as:

· Equal before God.

· Equal before the law.

· Equal in their rights.

Cameroon and Cameroonians do not deserve their current plight. The land that embodied the best of the African spirit in the first half of the twentieth century, that has exhibited African serenity for a century now, must not continue to suffer the double whammy of imperialism — the loss of more than half a million lives in the cause for reunification and independence of the territories from the partitioned German Kamerun at the hands of France in collaboration with the puppets it handed power over to in 1960, and today the loss of thousands of Cameroonian lives from an avoidable conflict triggered by the system France has been maintaining in the country since then, and by the heirs of the minority in Anglophone Cameroon that were and are against the reunification of the territories of the former German Kamerun.

I hope Cameroon and Cameroonians are not being punished for reuniting by foreign interests using those Cameroonians who did not and never really cherished its reunification --- the Ambazonian forces and the system running the country (France and its puppets)?

Janvier Tchouteu October 30, 2020

THE ETHNIC HOMELANDS(TRIBES) IN PRESENT DAY CAMEROON THAT WERE DIVIDED BY THE PARTITION OF GERMAN KAMERUN

2021-05-02T15:57:00.003-07:00

The indigenous ethnic groups that straddle the borders of the provinces or regions of English-speaking Cameroon and the neighbouring provinces or regions of French-speaking Cameroon:

· Bafaw-Balong

· Balong-Bafaw

· Bakaka

· Bakossi

· Bali

· Bamileke

· Bamoun

· Barombi/Bankon/Bakoko/Basaa

· Banso

· Duala-Mungo

· Mungo-Duala

· Mambila

· Mbo(h)

· Ngemba (in the broader sense)

· Tikar (broader sense)

Janvier Tchouteu First published on 8/11/13 2:41 PM on the "New Cameroon Views Blog"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Map_of_the_Grassfields_languages.svg

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http://www.ethnologue.com/17/map/CM_w/

2017-06-27T03:54:00.002-07:00

Triple Agent, Double Cross

“Triple Agent, Double Cross is a taut and engrossing thriller… there is authenticity in the attitudes it takes, and credibility in the characters, settings and situations it portrays…The structure of the novel is clear and comprehensible, and it is constructed with a strong sense of dramatic necessities such as timing and suspense, and the need for constant action and interaction…the author keeps up the critical tension that takes the reader through the book…The actual writing, the literary style, is first class and entirely appropriate to the genre…the reader is effortlessly transported from the opening pages, into the world of the novel, and dare not leave until the very end. The writing is strong and fluent, and therefore maximizes the potential brought to the book by an impressive, cleverly constructed plot…This is a professional and an accomplished piece of writing.”

—Angelina Anton

Editorial Director of Minerva Press

“A mind-stirring fiction that sticks long after you have read it.”

—The Post

“A story no thriller fan can afford to put away.”

—Michael Wette

Triple Agent, Double Cross

A THRILLER

Janvier

Chouteu-Chando

TISI BOOKS

NEW YORK, RALEIGH, LONDON, AMSTERDAM

PUBLISHED BY TISI BOOKS

www.tisibooks.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 3: Immigration

Chapter 4: Declining Income

Chapter 5: Jobs Moved Overseas

Chapter 6: Education

Chapter 7: Hillary Clinton and the Media

Chapter 8: Russia and its President Vladimir Putin

Titles by the author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the people out there who believe in humanity, democracy, freedom, liberty, social justice and equality.

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he concludes that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.

H.L. Mencken

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.

Mark Twain

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Marcus Aurelius

In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the clear majority of the rest of us, either do not care, do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed into acquiescence

Kurt Nimmo

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Voltaire

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

Carl Bernstein, U.S. journalist.

A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

Nikos Kazantzakis

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

Adolf Hitler

Maps

Map of the USA

2008 presidential election Map

2012 presidential election Map

Foreword

It was interesting to observe the primaries of the 2016 presidential election from the sidelines, especially during the early stages of the process, when it seemed unlikely that there could be an upset, when almost everyone thought the candidates firmly embraced by the establishment would emerge as the winners of the throng of aspirants vying for the highest office of the land through the Democratic and Republican parties. Therefore, I was expecting to see Hillary Clinton emerge as the Democratic nominee and Jeb Bush as the Republican candidate likely to take the party to the White House.

But then, as the primaries progressed, I realized that Donald Trump, the aesthetic billionaire and media celebrity, was actually the only Republican candidate that found a way to communicate with the common man in America; I also realized that 74 year old Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist who decades earlier could have been labeled a Communist and thrown in jail owing to the hysteria spawn by McCarthyism at the time, was actually the one who could help take the United States of America out of the current quagmire and lead the country in creating a multi-polar order in the world.

So, I became interested. I observed, I listened, I researched, and I analyzed. It soon dawned on me that the entire process was full of progressions and patterns that the media was failing to realize or refusing to acknowledge. I tried to explain them to those around me or those with a curious mind. But then, in a world where most people feed off the consent built by the mainstream media, I was a mad man. However, one can take some satisfaction if there is a pattern to his or her madness. From expressions like “Bernie Sanders doesn’t stand a chance…”, some of my sceptics ended up saying things like “He could have made a better Democratic nominee.”. “From “Donald Trump is nothing but a clown”, I am being told he evolved into a formidable opponent who is going to be thrashed anyway.

No, he wouldn’t be thrashed, I tell my sceptics. Still, they don’t believe me. That is how the idea of this account arose. It is nothing but a concise analysis of how Donald Trump is going about winning the 2016 presidential election.

· Insight into Cameroon

· Africa’s Pearl

· Longest serving Heads of State in Africa

· Cameroon’s Economic Performance Vis-à-vis the Rest of the Central African Region

· Why Cameroon Needs Change

· Who the Enemies of the People are

· Politicians and Revolutionaries in the Struggle

· Paul Biya: President of Cameroon

· Africa’s Haunted Heart

· The Demanding Task for the Post-Independence Generations

· Mistakes “The New Cameroon” Needs to avoid

Maps

Titles by the author

“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”

Barack Obama

“The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.”

Kwame Nkrumah

“When two brothers are busy fighting, an evil man can easily attack and rob their poor mother. Mankind should always stay united, standing shoulder to shoulder so evil can never cheat and divide them.”

Suzy Kassem

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

Rosa Luxemburg

“Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand [...] The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others. Hence the twentieth century has become the century of colonial emancipation, the century of continuing revolution which must finally witness the total liberation of Africa from colonial rule and imperialist exploitation.”

Kwame Nkrumah

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Cameroon’s historic civic-nationalists and union-nationalists who dedicated their lives for the land they love, loved, and suffered deprivations and even death for the cause to alleviate the wellbeing of the Cameroonian people.

Acknowledgements

This account is dedicated to the loving memory of Dr. Samuel F. Tchwenko

Introduction

When Britain and France defeated the German overseas army in Kamerun, the German colony in the central African region from 1884-1916, and then occupied the land, it was considered a strategic decision to deprive Germany of its richest colony in Africa, and therefore some of the raw materials it needed in its war effort against its enemies in World War One.

The Treaty of Versailles — the most important of the peace treaties signed on 28 June 1919 that brought World War I to a close by ending the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers, confirmed the loss of German Kamerun, and gave a seal of approval of Kamerun’s partition by Britain and France into British Cameroons (one fourth of the territory) and French Cameroun (the remainder of pre-1911 Kamerun).

Why was there no Kamerunian resistance to this partition, or why were there no vocal voices protesting the division of Kamerun? pundits would ask.

The answer lies in the fact that at the onset of the First World War (The Great War), the German colonial army in Kamerun executed the leaders (Martin-Paul Samba — born Mebenga Mebono, Rudolf Duala Manga Bell and their collaborators Edande Mbita and Madola) of the land’s civic-nationalist movement that was formed in 1910 with the goal to liberate it from German colonial rule.

The people of the partitioned Kamerun would rue this economic and social disruption of their lives and ponder the high deceleration in development that ensued under the rule of their new foreign patrons. Still, they would be sober enough to side with Britain and France against Nazi Germany and its allies during the Second World War; still they would serve in their thousands in the British and French Armies that fought in Africa, Asia and Europe. In fact, after Germany invaded France, occupied the north of the country and established Vichy France (the successor of the Third Republic from July 1940 to August 1944) in the south of the country — a de facto client and puppet state of Nazi Germany, French Cameroun would be the first French overseas territory to oppose Vichy France and side with Charles De Gaulle, the French general who refused to accept France’s surrender to Nazi Germany and who vowed to resist Germany from abroad.

French Camerounians went on to form the bulk of General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French Forces that was formed in Africa, and then went on to kick Vichy rule out in French Cameroun and French Central Africa, before marching all the way to Libya and challenging Italian forces there, a move that would lead to the Allied liberation of North Africa from Axis (German-Italian) control. French Camerounians would continue playing an active role in the fight that liberated Paris and the rest of France from German control.

So, when these French Camerounian former soldiers who fought for France returned and joined forces with other Kamerunian civic nationalists demanding the reunification and joint independence of French Cameroun and British Cameroons, it was a resuscitation of the cause of liberation snuffed outed by the Germans when they executed Martin Paul Samba, Rudolf Duala Manga-Bell and their associates. The formation of the Union of the Populations of the Cameroons (French: Union des Populations du Cameroun - UPC) on 11 April 1948 in French Cameroun, and the rise of UPC offshoots and sister parties in British Cameroons attested to the seriousness of the reunification and independence agenda. However, that agenda conflicted with French designs on the land and Francophone Africa.

Even so, the UPC did not see it coming when the French authorities embarked on suppressing it, starting with its ban on 13 July 1955, thereby forcing most of the party’s leadership to flee into exile to British Southern Cameroons, then Egypt. Guinea, Ghana and China.

That was how France’s relentless drive to thwart the “Kamerunian Dream” (Cameroonian Dream) began. That was France’s first step that has led to the continuous frustration of the popular drive to found “THE NEW CAMEROON”.

When in April 1956, Pierre Joseph Auguste Messmer, a hero of the legendary General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French Forces during the Second World War, replaced Roland Pré whose July 13, 1955 decree banned the UPC, many Cameroonian civic-nationalists (Cameroonian union nationalists or Kamerunist) in particular, and French Camerounians in general, were hopeful that the new High Commissioner or governor would ease tensions in the French Trust Territory. But that was not the case. Pierre Mesmer immediately went about accelerating the military clamp down on the UPC while grooming local political forces submissive to France’s game plan for French Cameroun, all the while, never heeding the voices of the people of the land.

…France granted limited autonomy to French Cameroun, whereby France placed some political powers in the hands of its protégés in the Trust Territory. Machinations…led André-Marie Mbida to become the first indigenous Prime Minister of French Cameroun. After trying for two years to convince the French Trusteeship administration to uplift the ban, the UPC leadership realized belatedly that despite its seventy percent command of the support of the population and an even higher percentage of intellectuals, the French authorities were still bent on preventing the UPC from influencing the territory’s political evolution and direction.

…The UPC’s call for the reunification of British Cameroons and French Cameroun before an eventual independence had won overwhelming support in both territories, even though it now looked like the party may have to watch the political development of the territories from the sidelines. Many wondered whether the Kamerunian Dream of reunification and independence could be realized without its propagators, now that the puppets that France was using in French Cameroun’s political arena hardly even knew the concepts or the components of the dream for a New Cameroon.

…However, when in January 1958, the two-month old right-wing government of French Prime Minister Félix Gaillard D'Aimé promoted Pierre Messmer from the position of High Commissioner of French Cameroun to the post of High Commissioner of French Equatorial Africa, and then replaced him with Jean Ramadier, the son of Paul Ramadier who was the left-wing former Prime Minister of France from 22 January 1947 – 24 November 1947, there was an opportunity to exploit. Judging from Jean Ramadier’s tenures as the High-Commissioner of Niger from 1956-1956 and of Guinea from 1956 to January 1958, he was the right person to deal with in resolving the ban on the UPC.

…When Jean Ramadier publicly declared that he supported the reunification of French Cameroun and British Cameroons, and then started the process of replacing André-Marie Mbida with his deputy Ahmadou Ahidjo, many people did not see that coming…The UPC heads were beginning to rejoice over the developments when news reached them that February, reporting the transfer of Jean Ramadier to an undisclosed post barely a month after he started working in French Cameroun. His replacement was Xavier Antoine Torré of the Radical Party, who quickly transformed himself into Ahmadou Ahidjo’s puppet master.

… French policy in French Cameroun, especially France’s brutal war against the populations supporting the banned UPC…spelled disaster for the progressive spirit of the people…a collective dream happened to be the most effective tool to unite, mobilize and move a people forward, even for a negative cause. Dreams were impossible to usurp…only the dreamers of a dream can translate their dreams into worthy practical endeavors that are devoid of haunting errors. After all, they are the ones who carefully observed the link between their dreams and reality; they are the ones who worked consciously to blend them into one.

… the living French legend General Charles De Gaulle returned to power in France on June 01, 1958, created the Fifth French Republic, pledged to restore French greatness in world affairs, and promised to make its colonies and territories know no other independence than the independence of France. He did so by crafting a special cooperation policy for France to implement in its colonies and territories, making it the framework of their relationship after granting independence to these colonies and overseas territories. But before moving to the implementation phase, the Fifth French Republic embarked on a mission to eliminate the head of the political and partisan movement that was the most threatening to French control in Sub-Saharan Africa. When on September 13, 1958, the French Army in French Cameroun slayed Ruben Um Nyobé near Boumnyebel, the village of his birth, they thought his killing would deal a deathblow to the UPC as a political party and to the resistance that it was leading against French control in the land…

…The UPC leader’s murder while on his way to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict with his adversaries …happened at a time that the party was still contemplating an all-out armed struggle against French rule in the land as the only option left in pursuing the cause. This assassination of the renowned head of the land’s most prominent political organization became a memory that would haunt Cameroonian union-nationalism and radicalize the party in its belated effort to pick up arms and defend itself in its struggle for the reunification and independence of British Cameroons and French Cameroun.

As another revelation of its game plan, France granted French Cameroun its independence under the puppet government of Ahmadou Ahidjo on January 01, 1960, concluding the masquerade with another gross deception called “The Colonial Pact” — a lopsided socio-economic and political agreement with a military component that allowed France to retain its forces in the newly independent Republic of Cameroun, thereby maintaining its de facto influence in the new country and its overwhelming control of Cameroon's destiny.

Culled from the book Disciples of Fortune

III

Even though the British complied with France’s request and banned the UPC in British Cameroons in 1958, the party’s offshoots and sister parties would continue to champion the cause of reunification, so that British Southern Cameroons would vote in the 1961 United Nations-sponsored plebiscite to reunite with the former French Cameroun. This partial reunification led by sincere Anglophone Cameroonian union-nationalists would not realize the New Cameroon since these English-speaking union-nationalist had to work with Francophone pseudo-nationalist puppets of France who were not only at the bidding of France against the land’s French-speaking union-nationalists led by the UPC, but stood as classic French puppets per se who never worked for the reunification and independence of the lands of the former German Kamerun, and who were in power to execute France’s agenda — the decimation of Kamerunism (Cameroonian union-nationalism) and the subjugation of the people of the former British Southern Cameroons. So, it is not surprising that with the defeat of the UPC in 1970, Anglophone Cameroonians too started suffocating under the brutal French-imposed system and the Ahidjo/Biya dictatorships, which is why the English-speaking regions of Cameroon are the most bitter with the political establishment today.

French puppet Ahmadou Ahidjo would manage the French-imposed system until 1982, the year he handed power to his prime minister Paul Biya as directed by the new French president Francois Mitterrand. The regime of Paul Biya has successfully ensured the survival of the anachronistic system and the Franco-Cameroonian political establishment, thereby perpetuating the ruination of Cameroon and suppressing the will of the overwhelming majority of Cameroonians who reject the French political mafia, the system, the political establishment and Paul Biya himself.

Some say the social-engineering of Cameroon is almost complete, and that Cameroon will become irredeemable in less than a decade, especially since the establishment has successfully silenced the parties that arose in 1990 claiming to be in the opposition, by coopting them into the system, a process that is transforming them into so-called opposition parties. I think so too. But insightful Cameroonians are not disheartened. These so-called opposition party leaders were after all members of the Ahidjo/Biya single party system until 1990, when tapping on the worldwide wind of change generated by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, and the desire of Cameroonians for change and multi-party democracy, they left the single party (Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement — CPDM) and formed political parties of their own, purporting to be against the Biya regime and the French-imposed system, a move that saw millions of freedom-loving and democracy-seeking Cameroonians flocking to their parties.

Today, the post-independence generations of Cameroonians understand that the task of founding the New Cameroon does not only involve overcoming the Biya regime, but requires the dismantling of the dysfunctional French-imposed system in the country. That means completing Cameroon’s (Kamerun’s) unfinished liberation.

An Insight into Cameroon

Nature must have designed the uniquely situated area in central Africa that became known as Cameroon even before the western colonial powers conquered Africa and sought to create larger entities from the ethnic groups and tribes of the continent. The world knew the area as the German colony of Kamerun for more than three decades until its partition by Britain and France into British Cameroons and French Cameroun. That was after the victorious European powers wrestled the colony from the hands of Germany during the First World War.

For thousands of years, the land mass experienced groves of migrating tribes and ethnic groups that wandered across the African continent. However, Cameroon got its diversity and unusual mix of ethnic groups that persist today from the migrations of the last millennium.

It is from the southern half of Cameroon that Africa’s largest ethno-linguistic group called Bantu, otherwise known as Niger-Congo-B, spread to eastern and southern Africa.

Northern Cameroon is the western fringe of the withering Nilo-Saharan populations from The Sudans and Ethiopia. It also became the base of early settled Niger-Congo-A populations.

Over the years, the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo-A ethnic groups of the North were subjected to the expanding influence of Afro-Asiatic speaking Shua Arabs, Tuaregs and numerous Chadic groups from West Africa and North Africa. Doomed to perpetual distrust and misunderstanding in a stretch of land that starts as a plain and turns into a plateau in its southern stretch called the Adamawa, these populations of the North have finally learned to live together.

Beyond this Adamawa plateau region is a portion of Central Cameroon called the Western High Plateau. For centuries, this hilly region of highland savannah was the borderland of the Northwestern Bantus, comprising at the time scattered and sparsely populated settlements of small Bantu villages braving the chilly climate of the mountainous terrain.

The Central Highlands that constitute the Adamawa plateau and the Western High Plateau was in a state of turmoil in the eighteenth century. The disastrous sweep of Sene-Gambian speaking Fulani warriors brought about by Ousman Dan Fodio’s jihad to spread Islam in what became Northern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon destabilized the indigenous populations of the North by forcing the different ethnic groups there to either resist the invaders and their religion or capitulate to their might. The Bamileké people were one of the groups that chose to fight.

Following years of resisting the Fulani warriors and witnessing the scorch of their homelands in the Adamawa region, the Bamileké people buckled and moved to the South in search of a new homeland. The Western Highlands otherwise called the Bamenda Highlands, an area sparsely settled by Bantu tribes became the place of abode for Bamileké people who quickly blended with the local population of the area, creating a new mix of Bamileké culture that prevails today. Like the Bamilekés, other prominent ethnic groups like the Bamoun, Bali, Tikar and Banso peoples also escaped from Islamization in the North and settled in the North and East of the new Bamilekéland. This reconfiguration of the ethnic composition of the land was still going on when Germany claimed the territory as its colony and stabilized the situation there.

Culled from Disciples of Fortune

The African Pearl

If you board a plane or ship plying any of the international routes and ask to be taken to the heart of Africa, do not be surprised to find yourself disembarking in Cameroon. It is a beautiful country per se, situated opposite the middle portion of Brazil, on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean. Bordered by six countries of which Nigeria is the most prominent neighbor, Cameroon appears on maps like a heavily pregnant mother carrying a baby on her back.

This peculiar geopolitical entity was created by accident and apportioned to Germany during the 1884 Berlin conference that carved up Africa. Thereafter, Berlin treated German Kamerun as its treasured colony for thirty-two years until Great Britain and France captured the land during the First World War, partitioned it into British Cameroons and French Cameroun, and then went on to lord it over the people for four decades. However, they too were challenged by Cameroonian civic nationalists who campaigned for the divided territory’s reunification and self-rule. Today, English and French are the country’s official languages, mirroring the dominance of the two Indo-European languages in Africa.

They say the gods have a design even in the most outrageous acts of mortals. If that is the case, then it also applies to Cameroon. The country has defied so many odds in its history that the people now pride themselves with the saying that “Impossible isn’t a Cameroonian word.”

Renowned voices tend to call Cameroon “Africa in miniature”, not only because of its fanciful shape and turbulent history, but also because of the physical and human aspects of its geography. It is the point in Africa where the East meets the West and where the North meets the South. It is a country that features plains and mountains, plateaus and valleys, rivers and seas, lakes, and waterfalls and other landmarks that mirror the rest of Africa. The south is dominated by equatorial and tropical rainforests, the north is covered by Sahelian vegetation, and the middle portion of the country is graced with high savannah of mixed grassland and forest. In fact, all the different flora and fauna in Africa can be found in this carelessly-drawn triangle called Cameroon.

The curious eye is apt to notice varying statures, facial types and shades of complexion as it travels throughout Cameroon—the result of the territory’s history as the crossroads of African migrations. Anthropological linguists hold that all of Africa’s four major language groups converge in Cameroon.

The southern portion of the country is the base from where Bantu speakers spread to southern and eastern Africa. The furthest spread of Afro-Asiatic peoples is in the north of this territory, featuring groups like the Semitic-speaking Arabs, Berber-speaking Tuaregs, Chadic-speaking Hausas and Batas, and Fula or Fulfulde-speaking Fulanis or Peuls. Nilo-Saharan speakers dominate the north of the country in their furthest spread to the west of the African continent. Also present in Cameroon are small ethnicities of the fourth major subgroup called Niger-Congo-A that occupy the southwestern border regions with Nigeria. Settled in the northwestern portion of the country that looks like the pregnant part of mother Cameroon is the fifth and unique indigenous group that you will find only in Cameroon. Named semi-Bantu, Graffi or southern Bantoid, this group has characteristics of all the four major language groups or sub-races in Africa. Legends and lore hold that semi-Bantus are originally of Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan descent and that they assimilated all the peoples they encountered in the course of their migration. The Bamileké people are the dominant ethnicity in this group.

It is true that Cameroon’s human and physical wealth has been the source of its turbulent history, its pride and the ingredients that give its people a unique flavor. The flavor has produced colorful Cameroonian characters that the curious eye and mind is likely to enjoy by hating or loving them, pitying or angrily denouncing them. These characters provide insights into the human nature and the African continent that is haunted by leaders with the evil disposition.

While other African peoples have picked up arms and warred among themselves to have their country split up, Cameroon is the only geo-political entity in the continent whose inhabitants went to war to reunite its people separated by the legacy of the Anglo-French partition of the former German colony of Kamerun. It is the only country where those who fought for its reunification and independence are yet to assume political power, as they continue to languish from the defeat suffered in the hands of the French overlords and the puppets the French political establishment installed in power in Cameroon. It is the land where you will find Africa’s biggest political deception and sleaziest mafia. It is the country in Africa with the lowest number of heads of state in its history, yet it is a country that is unlikely to engage in internecine war to get rid of the suffocating system.

In the middle of the twentieth century, a child was born in Cameroon who by the age of ten, proved he could become anything he wanted to be. This child prodigy happened to be the son of a soldier of the Free French Forces that fought across the African desert in the drive that liberated France from German occupation during the Second World War...

(Culled from Triple Agent, Double Cross)

Part II: Afterthought on 07/04/2015: Cameroon as a Hijacked Nation

In power since 1982 is Africa's absentee dictator Paul Biya, who was made the successor of his predecessor Ahmadou Ahidjo by an order from former French President Francoise Mitterrand; Ahidjo, who himself was brought to power by the French to usurp the aspirations of Cameroonians in their liberation struggle led by the UPC that the French banned in 1955, a party with more than 80% of the land's intellectuals and even more national support. France had made sure Ahidjo's power was secured by decimating its support base in a 12-year war against the party and by killing all the UPC leaders (Ruben Um Nyobe 1958, Felix Moumie in Geneva 1960, Oostende Afana 1966, Ernest Ouandie 1971 etc.), leaving Cameroon a nation haunted by an "Unfinished Liberation Struggle". Today, Cameroonians are out not only to get rid of the Dictator Biya's autocracy, but also to get rid of the French-imposed system that its custodians want to continue with someone else after Paul Biya departs.

Part III: Cameroon under an oppressive system and haunted by Terrorism

Compounded by the retrogressive system and the lunacy of the Biya regime is the specter of Boko Haram that started haunting northern Cameroon a few years ago, a distorted form of Islam espoused by a group that sees glory in the murder of the innocent (women, children and other civilians), a spillover from Nigeria's religious tension and an amalgamation of geopolitics as foreign interests extend the exploitation of resources in the Lake Chad basin. Only a Cameroon rid of the retrogressive French-imposed system and headed by those who put the interest of the land above their personal interests or the interests of foreign entities who have no genuine concern for the land, can the citizens of Cameroon be certain that the country and government would be able to handle the insecurity posed by anti-people and dehumanized groups like Boko-Haram. In fact, Boko-Haram in North Cameroon and the system/Biya regime are in symbiosis as they make each other relevant in a space where both are loathed by the vast majority of Cameroonians.

LONGEST SERVING HEADS OF STATE IN AFRICA AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

Rank	Name		Country	Office	Tenure Began	Length of Tenure
1.		Paul Biya	Cameroon	Prime Minister, then President	30 June 1975	40 years, 129 days
2.		Mohamed Abdelaziz	Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic	General Secretary and President	30 August 1976	39 years, 68 days
3.		Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo	Equatorial Guinea	President^[1]	3 August 1979	36 years, 95 days
4.		José Eduardo dos Santos	Angola	President	10 September 1979	36 years, 57 days
5.		Robert Mugabe	Zimbabwe	Prime Minister, then President	18 April 1980	35 years, 202 days
6.		Ali Khamenei	Iran	President, then Supreme Leader	13 October 1981	34 years, 24 days
7.		Hun Sen	Cambodia	Prime Minister^[2]	14 January 1985	30 years, 296 days
8.		Yoweri Museveni	Uganda	President	29 January 1986	29 years, 281 days
9.		Nursultan Nazarbayev	Kazakhstan	First Secretary, then President	22 June 1989	26 years, 137 days
10.		Islam Karimov	Uzbekistan	First Secretary, then President	23 June 1989	26 years, 136 days
11.		Omar al-Bashir	Sudan	President^[3]	30 June 1989	26 years, 129 days
12.		Idriss Déby	Chad	President^[4]	2 December 1990	24 years, 339 days
13.		Isaias Afwerki	Eritrea	President^[5]	27 April 1991	24 years, 193 days
14.		Emomali Rahmon	Tajikistan	President^[6]	19 November 1992	22 years, 352 days
15.		Alexander Lukashenko	Belarus	President	20 July 1994	21 years, 109 days
16.		Yahya Jammeh	The Gambia	President	22 July 1994	21 years, 107 days
17.		Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson	Iceland	President	1 August 1996	19 years, 97 days
18.		Denis Sassou Nguesso	Republic of the Congo	President	25 October 1997	18 years, 12 days
19.		Kim Yong-nam	North Korea	President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly	5 September 1998	17 years, 62 days
20.		Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi	Samoa	Prime Minister	23 November 1998	16 years, 348 days
21.		Abdelaziz Bouteflika	Algeria	President	27 April 1999	16 years, 193 days
22.		Ismaïl Omar Guelleh	Djibouti	President	8 May 1999	16 years, 182 days
23.		Vladimir Putin	Russia	President	9 August 1999	16 years, 89 days
24.		Paul Kagame	Rwanda	President	24 March 2000	15 years, 227 days
25.		Bashar al-Assad	Syria	President	17 July 2000	15 years, 112 days
26.		Joseph Kabila	Democratic Republic of the Congo	President	17 January 2001	14 years, 293 days
27.		José Maria Neves	Cape Verde	Prime Minister	1 February 2001	14 years, 278 days
28.		Ralph Gonsalves	Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	Prime Minister	29 March 2001	14 years, 222 days
29.		Recep Tayyip Erdoğan	Turkey	Prime Minister, then President	14 March 2003	12 years, 237 days
30.		Filip Vujanović	Montenegro	President	22 May 2003	12 years, 168 days
31.		Anote Tong	Kiribati	President	10 July 2003	12 years, 119 days
32.		Ilham Aliyev	Azerbaijan	Prime Minister, then President	4 August 2003	12 years, 94 days
33.		Artur Rasizade	Azerbaijan	Prime Minister	6 August 2003	12 years, 92 days
34.		Abdelkader Taleb Omar	Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic	Prime Minister	29 October 2003	12 years, 8 days
35.		Shavkat Mirziyoyev	Uzbekistan	Prime Minister	11 December 2003	11 years, 330 days
36.		Roosevelt Skerrit	Dominica	Prime Minister	8 January 2004	11 years, 302 days
37.		James Michel	Seychelles	President	14 April 2004	11 years, 206 days
38.		Heinz Fischer	Austria	Federal President	8 July 2004	11 years, 121 days
39.		Lee Hsien Loong	Singapore	Prime Minister	12 August 2004	11 years, 86 days
40.		Mahmoud Abbas	Palestine	President	15 January 2005	10 years, 295 days
41.		Faure Gnassingbé	Togo	President	4 May 2005	10 years, 186 days
42.		Salva Kiir Mayardit	South Sudan	President	30 July 2005	10 years, 99 days
43.		Pierre Nkurunziza	Burundi	President	26 August 2005	10 years, 72 days

CAMEROON’S ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE UNDER PAUL BIYA VIS-À-VIS THE REST OF THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REGION

No		1980	1981	1982	1983	1984	1985	1986	1987	1988	1989
	CENTRAL AFRICAN REGION
1	Cameroon	879	968	903	886	912	927	1,176	1,325	1,307	1,131
2	Central African Republic	309	312	295	276	262	336	426	458	482	467
3	Chad	148	171	161	157	165	174	209	231	264	243
4	Democratic Republic of the Congo	519	437	460	359	232	205	223	204	229	226
5	Equatorial Guinea	144	126	139	143	147	231	265	302	303	249
6	Gabon	5,722	5,049	4,630	4,337	4,081	4,206	5,386	3,987	4,302	4,601
7	Niger	449	376	338	292	228	218	279	317	314	291
8	Nigeria	885	885	746	492	347	331	255	264	284	267
9	Republic of the Congo	1,304	1,037	877	774	690	686	911	1,073	1,108	1,101

No		1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999
	CENTRAL AFRICAN REGION
1	Cameroon	1,098	1,188	1,056	1,070	686	677	753	733	681	699
2	Central African Republic	534	499	487	416	265	334	290	277	287	283
3	Chad	286	276	281	240	190	219	238	223	245	211
4	Democratic Republic of the Congo	227	213	186	235	124	116	145	128	92	82
5	Equatorial Guinea	295	272	308	291	201	262	398	702	545	847
6	Gabon	6,400	5,628	5,649	5,332	4,032	4,655	5,214	4,759	3,908	3,965
7	Niger	321	292	284	260	177	192	199	177	195	183
8	Nigeria	348	304	267	161	179	356	431	323	291	310
9	Republic of the Congo	1,254	1,185	1,237	1,099	703	817	981	871	711	834

No		2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
	CENTRAL AFRICAN REGION
1	Cameroon	655	603	663	807	909	930	979	1,084	1,224	1,114
2	Central African Republic	247	246	256	289	316	329	352	398	455	439
3	Chad	186	223	254	319	501	651	681	739	863	712
4	Democratic Republic of the Congo	80	95	100	99	111	118	141	156	75	162
5	Equatorial Guinea	1,321	1,710	2,055	2,747	4,739	7,221	8,201	10,437	14,861	9,513
6	Gabon	4,204	3,815	3,894	4,665	5,395	6,354	6,829	8,075	9,994	7,421
7	Niger	155	163	181	224	238	269	282	322	392	371
8	Nigeria	390	361	471	524	662	824	1,039	1,153	1,401	1,110
9	Republic of the Congo	1,109	935	982	1,107	1,430	1,820	2,245	2,370	3,264	2,561

No		2010	2011	2012
	CENTRAL AFRICAN REGION
1	Cameroon	1,103	1,211	1,165
2	Central African Republic	429	463	446
3	Chad	837	1,006	1,006
4	Democratic Republic of the Congo	186	216	236
5	Equatorial Guinea	17,270	22,954	23,133
6	Gabon	9,715	12,385	11,928
7	Niger	370	399	422
8	Nigeria	1,465	1,522	1,654
9	Republic of the Congo	3,113	3,631	3,346

Using the GDP per capita or Gross Domestic Product per capita (dividing the total output of a country by the number of its inhabitants) based on purchasing power parity (PPP) as one of the parameters to accentuate the standard of living of a country's citizens, we observe with clarity that Africa's GDP per capita barely tripled over the past three decades, while the rest of the world's more than quintupled. And with inflation halving the value of output or wealth after every two decades, it becomes apparent that the standard of living of most African countries dropped over the past thirty years, while the world at large experienced substantial increase in the quality of life of its citizens.

Cameroon in particular emerges as the most mismanaged country in the world in a generation, standing out as the only country that did not experience a war or civil strife, yet impoverished its citizens through theft, corruption, mismanagement and incomprehension. Often called the "Sick Spirit of Africa" due to the usurper French-imposed system put in place in 1958 that acts against the interest of the majority of the citizens (One of the most dynamic in Africa), the regime of President Paul Biya that has been in power for thirty years exacerbates the malady with its blatant disregard of the choice and wellbeing of the Cameroonian people. As indicated in the years colored red, the Biya regime is a peculiar entity that pulls off the gamble of declaring itself the winner in elections despite putting the country into depressions and recessions. After all, it crafted the most efficient election rigging machinery in the world.

It has been observed with clarity that Cameroon and Africa risk being stuck in inertia forever if Cameroon―"The Sick Spirit of Africa”, The Democratic Republic of Congo―"The Sick Heart of Africa", do not win a place among the African countries with a sense of direction, and if they do not take their merited places as pillars of economic and democratic progress for the New Africa. These countries need to release the trapped potentials of their people, take their places as leaders in Central Africa and the "Heart of Africa", and foster their roles as the crossroads of inter-African cooperation, trade, infrastructural and telecommunication connectivity, and joint ventures. Middle Africa needs new, advanced, progressive and democratic systems in place to facilitate not only the development of the countries there, but also the facilitation of the realization of the economic union and political integration of Africa( A working African Union)―the optimal structure Africa needs in place to lift its population out of poverty. That is what the African Economic Miracle would be all about.

Why Cameroon Needs a Fundamental Change

Cameroon is in its last stages of decay. There are no prospects of it getting out of its lethal malady by using the human and material resources that the present anachronistic system can mobilize unless the system is fundamentally changed or overthrown and a reformed or new system put in place. The first aspect of change prescribes radical reforms while the second aspect of change requires a revolution. The first aspect calls for the replacement of most of our old and unworkable structures and values with new ones, while the second rejects all aspects of the anachronistic system and its values and calls for their total, complete and universal replacement by new ones. The difference in the two aspects of change lies only in the degree of replacement. However, the reformatory and revolutionary ideals and actions are meant to solve the socio-economic and political ills afflicting the Cameroonian state by challenging the status quo and its formulations.

In order to challenge the status quo, exponents of change ought to be backed up by a careful study to determine whether the six-decade-old system’s degree of decay would require reformatory or revolutionary measures. Well, Cameroon is rotten enough.

1) Cameroon’s decay is wrapped up in the injustices whose resultant shortcomings now haunt our everyday lives. These injustices are in the economic, social, ethnic and political domains.

Economically, Cameroon has been reduced to a beggar nation; the pride of its citizens denigrated, their dreams dashed and their hopes made to look like illusions. Yes, we are beggars despite our fabulous human and material potentials. Though having never been really rich, our fairly considerable economic standards that stood out during German colonial rule, that was exemplified in the 1950s and made remarkable between 1974-1984 (despite all the past constraints from the system and its puppet Ahidjo regime), have been greatly reduced, plunging us into abject poverty. The poverty is so deep that the vast majority of Cameroonians have lost faith in the system, the enthusiasm to engage in long-term projects to rise out of their miseries, and the dignity that befits a progressive people with a sense of purpose. The present system has made it extremely difficult for hard working and intelligent lads to rise up to their potentials, unless they compromise their honor by selling their souls for the favors from the custodians of the system, an opportunity which only a decimal are privileged to be exposed to. Government planning (both strategic and tactical) is so unrealistic, chaotic, unfocused and devoid of follow-up mechanisms that they tend to destroy and depress, instead of constructing and building resolve. There is blatant discrimination by officials at the upper echelons of the system who bog down the business and constructive efforts of the struggling masses because they are of the opposite political thinking, undesirable ethnic group or tribe, different religious belief, the hated social grouping or threatening region, or stereo-typed linguistic entity; just because these custodians of the system believe these enlightened Cameroonians threaten the status quo. Our material resources are being irrationally and wantonly exploited without an effectual development of the land and improvement in the lives of Cameroonians. Despite Cameroon’s vast agricultural, mineral, energy and other natural resources, we have failed to build the base of a processing or industrial nation, so that primary commodities are the only things we export today. The pro-French political and business class and their collaborators are solely responsible for this rape of the Cameroonian nation. So far, prospects of an economic recovery still remain nil because the anachronistic system does not want to loosen the control put in place by its neo-colonialist French lords, corrupt bureaucrats, unpatriotic political elite and business class who know or care little about Cameroon’s economic reality. The only way for the Cameroonian economy to stand on its feet again and assume the path of a progressive future is through a buildup of business confidence. That confidence can only be built after we rid the nation of all aspects of the economic shortcomings of the anachronistic system. Such a revolutionary task requires a rational economic transformation geared towards economic growth, transparency, a mitigation of the effects of unemployment and a commitment to involve all Cameroonians in the process of nation building.

On the social scene, our Cameroon, which we hold so dearly at heart, has also not been spared of decay. Education, which is supposed to be the right of every child, has been relegated to the point of abandonment by the Biya regime. That is why today, the majority of our children are poorly educated in an academic system that is not geared towards development and rational professionalism. Our educational system is behind the times in infrastructure, equipment, knowledge, skills and experience. The cost of educating a child has risen far above the means of the average Cameroonian due to the government’s nonchalant attitude towards the granting of subsidies to schools. Today, books and other educational materials are either in short supply, unavailable or are too expensive. The majority of our teachers are poorly trained and lag behind their counterparts elsewhere in the world in knowledge and skills. The undesirable result has been Cameroon’s continuously falling literacy rate and the decreasing competitiveness of our graduates. Meanwhile, the children of the oligarchy and collaborators of the system pursue their education abroad. They often return as overlords with no work experience abroad, but with the professionalism to steal in a smoother manner.

Today, hardly half a decade into the next millennium, the vast majority of the Cameroonian people are still living in filth and squalor. Good housing, available medical facilities and other social infrastructures are in short supply, having been relegated to the government’s bottom list of priorities. Town planning has become so chaotic. Even the basic necessity of water and electricity are inadequately provided despite our vast potentials in those resources. In the towns and cities especially, the once noble Cameroonian people are compelled to live alongside untreated garbage dumps, giant rats, cockroaches and other vermin. The country’s sanitation has fallen below pre-independence level. Even its transportation network and other infrastructures are a mockery to a people who are considered imaginative, dynamic and proud. These retrogressions are testaments to the fact that the country has fallen behind other nations since independence. In the world of advanced services and communication, the senseless system has made the country to lag pathetically behind time, even as other governments of the world quickly embrace technological progress. It does not bother the Biya regime that Cameroonians are living in misery because he has detached himself from the general Cameroonian reality and carved out a cocoon of affluence for himself and his mafia clique.

Leadership over the forces that should give Cameroon its strength (The people) has been undermined by government-instigated discrimination. Clannishness, tribalism, ethno-centrism, regionalism and other forms of division are often set aflame on groups (as scapegoats) in order to dispel discontent directed against the government and the system. The regrettable outcome of such moves has been the open and latent distrust that has caused the breakdown of cooperation between the forces that are supposed to work together to realize our potentials. While it is true that the Ahidjo and Biya regimes have favored certain social groupings, especially their ethnic groups, the reproach for complicity should not be put on any ethnic or linguistic group because collaborators of the system have been bred from virtually every group in Cameroon.

2) The unavoidable consequences of the economic, social and ethnic injustices are the poor management results that stand as Cameroon’s chronic malady today. Due to the fact that the government’s economic policies basically favor only a small minority of individuals, ethnic groups and regions; the vast potentials of the majority and disfavored are either cruelly exploited, left untapped and/or neglected. The regrettable result is that these majority and disfavored produce without a corresponding development in their lives and the environment around which they operate. This situation prevails while the favored minority swims in splendor, abundance, arrogance and mismanagement. The visible result is the inefficient utilization of our resources through over-exploitation, without the necessary subsequent developments in building and restoration. The consequence of this poorly targeted policy is the disorientation, disillusion, despondence and despair syndrome that has eaten deep into the ranks of the creative and progressive forces of the land. The fact that these forces have been estranged from participating in the running of the economic, social and political affairs of the land draws open a phase of conflict in our development―that is, how do we restore the harmonious cooperation between the political establishment and the majority of the economic sector whose advanced business leadership wants to realize a developed and progressive Cameroon? Unfortunately, for Cameroon, the majority that constitutes the creative and progressive forces are too dazed in their inability to mount a strong opposition or resistance to the system, while the minority that constitute the custodians of the system are so vocal and aggressive despite their poor records of incompetence, mismanagement, unaccountability, corruption, buffoonery, repression, waste and misuse of our resources. Unless we get rid of the management problem through the ideals of our union-nationalism, there will never be a correction of the injustices persisting in our social, economic and inter-ethnic lives. For that to be realized, we must get rid of the anachronistic system now and fast.

3) The mismanagement in Cameroon and the injustices that are prevailing stem from its anachronistic political structure. Early in the twentieth century 1910), Cameroon’s first nationalists led by Martin Paul Samba (Mebenga Mebono) and Rudolf Duala Manga Bell perceived that while striving for Kamerun’s independence from Germany, its colonial master at the time, so that the land could exist within the frame work of international cooperation, they wanted the land’s human and vast material resources to be rationally exploited and developed through the best combinations of internal and external cooperation. We were unfortunate because the German colonial administration opposed that new Kamerunian force. They executed its leaders, a sad epoch in our nationalism that made it to become dormant for decades, so that even after the defeat of the Germans, there was no nationalist force to defend the land against partition by the British and the French. Instead of the independence that Cameroon’s first nationalists strove for, the land and the noble Kamerunian people became subservient subjects instead of the British and French in 1918. However, three decades after, there was a resurgence of Cameroonian nationalism, which garbed the extra cloths of unification and independence. While espousing the ideals of Martin Paul Samba, Rudolf Manga Bell and the other early nationalists as far back as 1946, Cameroon’s union-nationalists decried the divisive, suppressive, oppressive, retrogressive and exploitative rule of its masters, specifically France and demanded the reunification and independence of the British Cameroons and French Cameroun. Unfortunately, the new masters, especially France, did not heed such a good-intentioned and authentic demand from the majority of Cameroonians. The UPC (Union of the Populations of Cameroon) that was at the forefront of the resurgent nationalism suddenly found itself tagged as communists and as an enemy of France, Britain and the western world. Using wanton oppression, the French banned the party, and then massacred, sidelined, cowed, corrupted and banished the true union-nationalists within the UPC. In the place of the union-nationalists and their original ideals, they put the French-puppet regime under Ahidjo Ahmadou to lead French Cameroun through quasi independence and reunification with British Cameroons.

It has been proven from the experiences of the past years that the majority of Cameroonians have always rejected the system and the Ahidjo and Biya regimes that the system created. Ahidjo and Biya failed to offer alternative ideas or programs on how to manage our material and human resources to eliminate the injustices that are plaguing Cameroon. Instead, they have shown their determination to continue defending the anachronistic system because it serves their interest to do so. The present French-backed regime relies heavily on the nation’s stereotypical armed forces and secret service, just like its predecessor did. It has not been less enthusiastic about using force to quell any form of protest or drive towards genuine democracy. Being used alongside force are the various methods of intimidation, corruption, election rigging and blackmail that have proven to be effective in other places in defeating exponents of change. Completely detached from the Cameroonian people and reality, the present French-created political structure gives the president limitless powers, while retaining power and decision making at all levels with the president and his close collaborators. The results from the workings of the system and its structures are all negative, with corruption having been elevated to the form of an art and falsity having become the modus operandi of the Biya regime. The repercussions from those negative values are the pathetically deep fall in our standards, and the erosion of our hope and dignity. Still, it does not bother the Biya regime that the hopeless nature of the status quo has revealed the unworkable nature of the system and its structures. The levers of the oppressive machinery of this system are preventing any adoption or acceptance of counter measures to the regime’s policies, measures that can rejuvenate the nation. That is why Cameroon’s present political power (The system) must be totally, completely and irrevocably overhauled if we must find a solution to the problems of mismanagement and injustices.

4) An agonizing fall in our basic human values is the depressing outcome of the anti-people policies and governance of the system for over half a century now. The fall is also the consequence of poor management whose results are the economic, social and ethnic injustices haunting the Cameroonian nation today? Morality and its higher order of humanism, which are supposed to be the cornerstone of any prosperous nation’s order, reputation, legality and even virtue, have no place in the workings of the anachronistic system and its custodian, the Biya regime. There is a breakdown in progressive family values―a rise in the rate of prostitution, drunkenness, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency and violent crime. Dishonesty and banditry have become a plague in our everyday lives. Religion has lost its original worth in the eyes of Cameroonians. What we have in place instead is the individualistic and self-centered concept of “Everyone for his/her belly”, a concept that embodies corruption, discrimination and dishonesty― ills that are haunting us today. For now, preparations and practical actions should be taken to restore the honor, dignity and progressive values of our traditions. Our new philosophy should promote constructive dialogue, cooperation and criticism. Our literature, history and other fields of art should reflect progressive and all-embracing Cameroonian values like our union-nationalism, while taking precautions to integrate only those foreign values that are compatible with Cameroonian reality. Culture, the culture that gives a nation its special identity is dying in Cameroon. With ties to virtually all the different cultural groups and language families in Africa, Cameroon deserves to be the champion of the African culture. Despite that fact, we observe today that our education, social programs, information and culture and communication actually discourage the development of our cultures. That is unacceptable.

The idea of how Cameroon should evolve as it is being experimented by the French-backed system that is under Paul Biya today has nothing progressive to offer. It has brought conformity only in the wrong values of dishonesty, corruption, disloyalty, laziness, discrimination and docility. It has failed to seek, harness and work on individual and group considerations which if put together constitute the Cameroonian view. The present outdated system constrains us to the point of despondence, and poses as a tremendous obstacle to the development of individual and group potentials. It is almost eradicating self-identity to be replaced by a conformity based on resignation, dishonesty, corruption and brutality.

Only through a carefully thought out new value, one that realizes the best of our creative and developmental potentials and one that advocates for a fundamental change of the anachronistic system, can our potentially great nation be saved. That new value should be capable of coming up with a new culture that embodies the progressive Cameroonian cultures. It should be a culture that would help in the formulation of a progressive political structure where the powers emanating from its levers would be capable of responding to the progressive ideas and the hopes and dreams of the Cameroonian people. It is only through that reconstituted and optimally progressive political and power structure that there can be an efficient management of our human and material resources, while taking into account Cameroonian and world realities. As a consequence, the economic, political, social and ethnic injustices that are prevailing due to the poor management (abuse of political power, unrealistic culture and the imposed conformity) would be properly tackled.

Today, the forces that stand as the best champion of the fundamental change are the union-nationalists. They are found in some of the political parties, religious bodies, social groupings, and also as individuals. However, in order to realize the fundamental change, our union-nationalists, young and old, would be led by the advanced representatives―the tested force.

Janvier Tchouteu April 4, 1995

Afterthought: September 06, 2010

For a nation whose citizens’ investments in other African countries more than triple the investments that they make at home; for a country with only about ten percent of its physicians at home ( more than 30% in France and about 20% in the USA) and that boasts one of the highest or perhaps the highest percentage of graduates in Africa vis-à-vis its population; Cameroon is a hijacked nation with no sense of direction, Cameroon is a nation held hostage by an anachronistic French-imposed and backed system that is completely detached from its reality to the point where it accuses the USA of human rights violations when the oppressive and repressive regime and its usurper Head of State Paul Biya that has been in power for twenty eight years, is known for changing the constitution with impunity. In fact, the Biya regime has created the most efficient election rigging machinery in the world.

POLITICIANS AND REVOLUTIONARIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NEW CAMEROON

Politicians are not those who are meant to change a system and take a country out of an impasse into the future. That is the work of revolutionaries.

Politicians operate in established systems and do the job of politicking to defend, safeguard or promote certain interests, be they individual, group, ethnic, regional, linguistic or national, based on empty phrases or through a clearly defined thought formulation (idea or concept).

Revolutionaries on the other hand are those challenging a system, expecting to bring it down and institute a new system that would serve the interest of the trodden majority (the suffering or struggling masses). In the cause to bring down the system, revolutionaries do not expect to benefit or thrive from the struggle. Instead, they are prepared to sacrifice everything for the struggle.

The sad thing is that while the Cameroonian struggle to change the system is a revolutionary struggle, most of the leadership in the so-called opposition parties talk of politics and expected rewards even though they are still engaged in the struggle to change the system. That is why most of them compromised the ideals of the struggle with excuses that “it is impossible to live on clean politics as a genuine opposition in Cameroon." There are and there have been Cameroonians who selflessly gave in their worth to the struggle and felt it was dishonorable to use the struggle to achieve personal benefits. They were and are the union-nationalists and revolutionaries.

During my years of involvement in the struggle, I finally realized that the system (the Ahidjo-Biya regimes backed by the French mafia group controlling African affairs) feared and respected these revolutionaries and union-nationalists for their genuineness, unwavering nature and integrity. But strangely enough, the politicians who profess to be in the opposition conceived a hatred for these revolutionaries and union nationalists just because these revolutionaries and union nationalists are genuine and are not like them, and because they look with horror at the deception of the politicians who are trying to live off politicking and in doing so, compromised the struggle and betrayed the aspirations of the struggling masses.

Strangely enough, we failed in this phase of the struggle (1990-2002) because politicians led the struggle to change the system (a revolutionary demand) instead of revolutionaries and union-nationalists who are far less likely to be compromised by the negative values of the anachronistic French-imposed system.

Janvier Tchouteu Friday, 15 April 2005

Who the Enemies of the People are

The vast majority of the Cameroonian people are aware of the historical revelation that change is inevitable in Cameroon. Still, this craving for change since 1910 has not brought about the realization of the New Cameroon. We have all been victims in this difficult, tortuous, traitorous and unsuccessful drive for change. The execution of our first nationalist leaders (Martin Paul Samba and Rudolf Duala Manga Bell) by the German colonial army in 1914, our indifference over that loss, our quiet acceptance of the partition of German Kamerun by Britain and France into British Cameroons and French Cameroun, and the methodical suppression and brainwashing of our nationalism were all indications of the difficulties ahead for the Cameroonian struggle.

Yes, we were in a state of lethargy for three decades after partition, a lethargy that left us without the enthusiasm and an organized force to repudiate the imposed partition of our land and realize our resurgent nationalism in both British Cameroons and French Cameroun. This nationalism assumed a union character by advocating for reunification, independence, freedom, liberty, development of both territories. Yet, it was a popular desire for change fraught with division, the self-centeredness of uncommitted leaders and external maneuvers by the colonial powers. The outcome of that second phase of the Cameroonian struggle was a partially reunited and quasi-independent Cameroon, where its French-speaking union-nationalist leaders got eliminated, exiled or subjugated; where its English-speaking union-nationalists were excluded and cowed into timidity; and where a Neo-colonialists French-imposed system was put in place managed in Cameroon by the regimes of puppets Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya.

The first Cameroonian president, his collaborators and French masters had little or no knowledge of and regard for the true aspirations of the Cameroonian people. Therefore, in no way could we have expected the Ahidjo regime and its successor the Biya regime to deliver Cameroonians to the change that they have been craving for since 1910. It is clear that the foundation of the quasi-independent and reunited Cameroon was defective even before the nation was born in 1961. Cameroon’s independence was defective because it was realized under the usurper Ahidjo regime and France without the consent of the majority of Cameroonians who constitute the force of our union-nationalism.

If the usurper leaders could not kill in themselves all the values, thought patterns and habits imbued by their French overlords, then how could we have expected them to lead Cameroonians to live the values and pattern of change that would lead to the new and desirable society of our dreams. This land has never had its destiny in its own hands since it became a consolidated entity. Imperialistic French designs in the guise of the French-imposed system, the complicity of the Ahidjo and Biya regimes, and the unpatriotic, unscrupulous and smug complacent nature of some Cameroonians have all contributed to cloud the Cameroonian dream for an authentic change (the creation of the desirable society) and the realization of the New Cameroon. The demanding task of freeing ourselves from the shackles of the Biya dictatorship, the retarding French-imposed system and the suffocation of the people with the evil disposition is not going to be easy. That task requires the best combination of reasoning, enthusiasm and rational desire. It is our shortcomings in our concerted efforts at interpreting, manifesting and applying those forces that are affecting the wind of change in Cameroon today.

May 26, 1990, marked a turning point in the history of the reunified Cameroon. The corrupt, oppressive, discriminatory, nonchalant, unpatriotic and incompetent rule of the Ahidjo-Biya regimes under the French-imposed oligarchic system became opposed across the national territory. Cameroonians were determined to become a part of the worldwide wind of change generated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union.

“Enough is enough”, “We want democracy, freedom, and liberty”, were some of the chants that illuminated the protest marches across the national territory.

Cameroonians were no longer prepared to continue allowing a nepotistic, ethnocentric, oligarchic, corrupt and neo-colonialist system under the Biya regime and its French backers to determine the course of our destiny. We were vocal in our determination to stop allowing the weight of decades of oppression, misinformation and misguided policies to drain us of our dynamism and deprive us from realizing our century-old dream of a progressive Cameroon. Our expressed desire for change was a popular aspiration, which called on Cameroonians to discard the wrong aspects of our past and build a new, totally and completely positive Cameroon. Our vocal determination not to be left behind in the worldwide wind of change that promised to realize a free society of nations was understood across Africa and the rest of the world. Five years after we took that historic step in the third phase of the Cameroon struggle, we are nowhere close to the change or the power that is the lever to realize it. Our potentially great nation is being left behind in the race to technological civilization and the trappings of human and material progress due to the steadfastness of the anti-people system. However, what is most worrying is that, at this early stage of the struggle, the forces for change are more divided than they were before 1990.

What went wrong?

Five years after, it has become clear for all to see that we have betrayed the drive towards change. We wanted change without ensuring a fundamental change of our mentalities, which had been badly infected during the years of political lethargy. Yes, we wanted change when we had not humanized our dehumanized selves. The change we wanted was only in words. We failed to react, respond and feel to the new demands of change as a renewed and reinvigorated people. That is why we could not detach ourselves from the more blinding aspects of our irrational desires, in order to conform to reasoning and enthusiasm. We have not fully braced ourselves to throw away the influences of the past years of colonialism, political lethargy, despondence, dishonesty, cynicism and distrust that had gripped the noble Cameroonian soul. Our desire for change has almost been defeated by the open and hidden enemies of change because of our empty phrases, feeble actions and divided ranks. The enemies of the people have pervaded our midst, ebbed away our energy and actions, denigrated our objectives and poisoned our minds. The enemies of the people have left Cameroonians, even those who are instinctively union-nationalist, in disarray

But then, who are these enemies of the people?

Simply, they are the criminals to the progressive Cameroonian spirit, the obstacles to the realization of the century old Cameroonian dream for a desirable society. Amongst the enemies of the people are the anti-union-nationalists, the pseudo-intellectuals, the unscrupulous politicians, the verminous businesspersons, the oblivious functionaries, neurotic leaders and even we the struggling masses.

1) The anti-union-nationalists, also made up of pseudo-nationalists, can be found in and out of the government of Paul Biya. These anti-union-nationalists are against the century old Cameroonian dream― an advanced ideal permeated by progressive Cameroonian concepts that is aimed at:

· Creating a genuine bilingual character for the nation

· Bridging the gap in the development of both the English and French-speaking territories

· Realizing a new, desirable and humanized Cameroonian mentality from the different breeds of thoughts and actions of its Anglophone and Francophone children

2) The pseudo-intellectuals are anti-union-nationalist with the extra cloak of advanced learning. The fact that they are detached from the Cameroonian dream subjects their high learning to misuse. These pseudo-intellectuals defend the shortcomings of their personal, family, clique, ethnic, linguistic and cultural attachments to the system through unjustifiable lies that defame the cause. Found at all levels in the Cameroonian society, they easily ally with both the internal and external forces against the people. They dominate the present regime, and they are noted for their failure to make their high learning compatible with the Cameroonian reality and to contribute to Cameroon’s socio-economic progress. They have never interpreted ideas, conveyed opinions and worked for the true aspirations of the people during the past four decades. These pseudo-intellectuals led by Paul-Biya are the greatest junks to the practical progress of this nation. They have distinguished themselves as those who have been spectacular in one field, but who for the sake of publicity and self-interest, expound beyond the limits of their talents and knowledge, and seek to educate, convince and win over the uninformed and undecided on subjects far beyond their scope. While engaging in this deception, these pseudo-intellectuals are aware of the fact that some people believe and respect them as intellectuals due to their academic achievements and ratings in their true fields. The fact that they go ahead to expound on the fields much beyond their scope and grasp, while knowing that they know little, and while also knowing that the people do not know that they know little beyond their true fields, makes them criminals to the progressive Cameroonian spirit. During the past four decades, the anti-union-nationalists have been working with the pseudo-intellectuals and the French powerhouse to give Cameroonians a false concept of themselves and to derail and delay the fundamental changes that we have been craving for.

3) Cameroonian politicians manifest the inner contradictions that have gripped our political scene during the past five decades. It has been observed with clarity that our politics is mostly a juxtaposition of anti-francophone practices, anti-Anglophone tendencies, ethnocentrism, regionalism, elitism, demagoguery and self-interest. Few of our political leaders are union-nationalists at heart even though the Cameroonian spirit is instinctively proud of the Cameroonian identity and upholds the dream of a desirable Cameroonian society. The different politicians and political groupings are very much a reflection of the extent of their embracement of these contradictory values. All the same, few of our politicians have indicated their true positions over the different concepts. Many insincerely identify themselves with popular political groupings whose ideologies they do not share. A look at these politicians can give us insights into the dilemma union-nationalists are facing in the struggle.

· The Francophiles or Anglophobes are those politicians who have an excessive fondness of French values, customs, people, institutions and/or manners. In their over-zealousness, they jealously or regretfully defend their fondness for anything French by being Anglophobes in rhetoric and actions. Besides being Francophiles, these politicians are openly ethnocentric, nepotistic and self-centered. It is clear for all to see that Francophiles have overwhelming dominated the system through the Ahidjo and Biya regimes.

· The counterparts of the Francophiles are the Anglophiles or Francophobes. They also share the ethnocentric, nepotistic and self-centeredness of the Francophiles. They have been very much excluded from the country’s political life just as much as the union-nationalists have. But many of them hide or have hidden their anti-French tendencies for the benefits and opportunities offered by the French-imposed system. The fact that these Francophiles and Anglophiles have snuggled themselves into all the major political groupings makes it difficult for the realization of change because they pose as the major dividing force in the country. In the most unfortunate accident in our history, Cameroon has been dominated by the minority regimes of Francophiles and their Anglophone collaborators. Time has proven that this nightmarish alliance and governance led to the ruination of our country to the pathetic state that it is today. All true union-nationalists need to take upon themselves the responsibilities to mitigate the effects of the bitterness and the distrust that exists between some in our English and French-speaking communities.

· An insult to the progressive minds of Cameroonians are the group of politicians whose political parties are out to secure individual, tribal or group interest― politicians who openly flaunt their disregard for the collective Cameroonian interest. The MDR of Diakolle Diasalla, the renegade UPC of Augustine Kodock, the PDC, etc. dominate this group.

· Cameroonians are also aware of another ambiguous group of politicians who have also snuggled themselves into popular political groups that have a national character and are regarded as the true guarantors of change. These so-called friends of the people are the most heinous of Judases who have concealed their vast selfish designs and traits of Francophilism, Anglophilism, tribalism, ethnocentrism and regionalism behind the general phrase of working for the interest of the people. Scratch them and you will find the enemies of the people, their true selves, staring back at you. However, their impatience and the goodwill of nature shall soon force them out of the mainstream of the struggle.

The people whose dreams have been betrayed and whose enthusiasm and dignity have been undermined should know that unless these pillars of reaction, conservatism and deceit are overthrown or rendered impotent, we would always find ourselves held back in our genuine efforts for change. It should be understood that these forces against change would persist in their deceptive ways in order to maintain their selfish interests and biased motives. Their steadfastness is making it difficult for the struggling Cameroonian masses to overcome their oppression and trauma, forcing them to make only desperate, unintelligent and futile protests and resistances. The interest of Cameroonians would be guaranteed only in a situation where they stay totally committed in their support for the authentic union-nationalists who are the true friends of the people.

4) Another enemies of the people are the unscrupulous businesspersons whose game plan is to prevail economically through unlawful means. They make excessive profits through tax evasion, extortion, defrauding, profiteering, racketeering, double-dealing and complicity in the wanton destruction and sale of the country’s resources. These unscrupulous businesspersons are indifferent to the fact that they are running the country down. The fact that they are in alliance with the unscrupulous Biya regime and that they dread any change that would require them to do clean business makes them enemies of the cause for a New Cameroon. Most of their cash is stashed in foreign banks because they fear the inevitable change would lead to confiscation. A critical look at the activities of the unscrupulous businesspersons reveals that they drain rather than contribute to the economy of Cameroon. They should be discouraged or legally disabled if they reject doing business in a clean manner in the New Cameroon. They are scum to the progressive business spirit, and they pose as a major obstacle to change and modernization. It should be noted that they are setting a bad precedence to the humanized and progressive businesspersons who would emerge from the new system that would emerge from change, businesspersons whose economic activities would also be out to alleviate the standards of the Cameroonian people.

5) No less a powerful obstacle to change is the functionary. For forty years, it has been so easy for radical nationalists, intellectuals, honest managers and competent administrators to be transformed into government functionaries who console themselves with the thought that they are working for the people and doing well within the framework of office routine in the corrupt system. They are using this professed goodness to justify their political inertia and compliance with the policies of the Biya-regime. The fact that these functionaries have given their unconditional allegiance to the French-imposed system and the Biya regime makes it difficult for them to wrestle their much-deserved interest from the government. This self-created difficulty emanates from the simple fact that these functionaries always believed that a holy alliance exists between them and the regimes, an alliance where they would have to defend the system even though it had become irredeemably bad. Even though it is obvious that the Biya regime has unilaterally broken the alliance, these functionaries are still in political inertia. Because they too have been enemies of the people in their actions and opponents of change in their bygone interests, they now find it difficult to heed the general call for change and join the people from whose ranks they come from. This timidity and foolish pride from the functionaries only helps to stall the wind of change, despite the fact that reality calls for an alliance between them and the people.

6) Leadership problems have been Cameroon’s infantile malady since reunification and independence. The fact that its genuine leaders who had the support of its people were massacred, exiled, sidelined and cowed into submission by the French and the puppet Ahidjo and Biya regimes left us with the curse of false leaders. Yes, the past four decades have indicated that. The leadership spectrum in Cameroon is a conflict of four types of leaders:

· We have the bad leaders whose leaderships have done much to destroy the way of life and the progressive values of the Cameroonian people. The usurper Paul Biya who presides as the president of Cameroon is a bad leader in the classic sense of the word, and rivals his predecessor in that domain. Lesser bad leaders are comic Cameroonian political figures like Augustine Kodock, Gustav Esaka, Diakolle Diasala, Achidi Achu and Bello Bouba Miagari.

· Also dominant in Cameroon’s political scene are the brilliant leaders. These leaders made themselves appealing to the people even despite their true intentions and convictions. They are the demagogues and renegades to the ideals they associate with. Towering in this group are figures like Ahidjo, Solomon Tandeng Muna, Mayi Matip, Hogbe Nleng, Musonge Peter, Woungly Masaga and other noisy but insignificant political figures around. Less conspicuous are the renegades of the people’s parties who are posing as union-nationalists.

· Not absent in the political game are the intelligent political figures. They get over the people and their values, and defy their beliefs through political maneuvers that only serve their interest. The intelligent leaders make the people to think, look and work in the direction that is to his interest, ego and conviction, sometimes combining his efforts with handouts and other inauthentic benevolent gestures. It is unfortunate that many Cameroonians have been brainwashed to cherish these handouts. Ahidjo and his disciples led by Bello Bouba Maigari are the masters of this deception.

· What Cameroon has been deprived of the most are the wise leaders. These are leaders who are realistic in their dealings with the people. They understand the people’s plights, hopes, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and try to help them to realize their dreams. These are the true friends of the people, the true union-nationalists from the times of Martin Paul Samba to the generations of the historic UPC leaders and over to our contemporary times. Unfortunately, for the Cameroonian struggle, none of the wise leaders have ever been allowed to harness the support of the majority of Cameroonians to lead the country. We hold the French puppeteers and the puppet regimes of Ahidjo and Biya responsible for that.

7) Depressing as it may sound, another set of enemies of the people is the self-centered flag bearers. These are the Cameroonian artists, players, writers, scientists and representatives of the country abroad who in the quest for glory conceal the plight of the Cameroonian people behind the façade of success. They would not stand by the people if it means working against their interests at home and abroad.

8) To be honest with ourselves, we the struggling masses are also posing as an obstacle to change. We have desired for the destruction of the corrupt, degrading, oppressive and inhuman French-imposed system without ridding ourselves of the recognized wrong habits, values and mentalities that we picked up from the system. We have not even begun to live, think and work in the patterns that are required of us by the new society that we intend to build. It is possible that even if we get rid of the present system, we may find ourselves incapable of instituting the complete change that we need because most of us may continue to think, act and live in the ways that the puppet regimes have deformed our minds into doing. In many ways, our words alone have changed without a corresponding change in ourselves. For us to realize our dreams, we are expected to match our change in words with a change in thought patterns and actions. Or else, we would remain our own worst enemies.

A sincere review of the political activities in Cameroon since May 26, 1990, reveals that the movement for change has encountered temporary setbacks in the third phase of the Cameroonian struggle. These setbacks are due to the actions of the anti-nationalists, the pseudo-intellectuals, the unscrupulous politicians, the verminous businesspersons, the oblivious functionaries, the neurotic leaders with a fair degree of intelligence, brilliancy and ruthlessness, as well as the struggling masses suffering from incomprehension. Without clearing our ranks, without being conscious of discipline and enforcing it all the more, without reassessing our commitments and objectives, and without humanizing our dehumanized selves, we may be compelled to wander a little longer in the wilderness of aimlessness, futility and incomprehension. An even when we get to the inevitable change, we may be surprised to find that we are incapable of harnessing our potentials to the fullest because of our old ties to the dehumanizing post-independence mentality and system.

NOVEMBER 24, 1994 Tchouteu Janvier

THE LIVING SPECTRE HAUNTING CAMEROONIANS

Pose this question to any Cameroonian with a deep perception of the world: Who is Africa’s most dishonest and illusionary head of state? The answer from the absolute majority would be obvious. Our tenant in the unity palace is that head of state.

Cameroon’s second president is a bad leader in the furthest sense of the word. His governance has destroyed most of the foundations of our people’s way of life and progressive values. Unprincipled, unscrupulous and visionless, he was elusive enough during his early years of leadership by convincing many to regard him as a brilliant leader. Yes, he made himself brilliant and appealing to the people even despite his true convictions.

The second Cameroonian president as the demagogue he is, harangued about his NEW DEAL of Rigor and Moralization, when he never intended to work for the interest of all Cameroonians. He came to power for the sole purpose of defending the interest of his patron(The mafia in the French establishment over its African policy), to enhance the material well-being and social position of his clique of unscrupulous businessmen, politicians, functionaries and above all the ethnic group of his birth.

The second Cameroonian president is a dishonorable man without convictions. He began his political manifestations as a Cameroonian nationalist of socialist orientation under the banner of the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC), but soon unhesitatingly discarded his nationalist garment for the high positions offered to renegades of the Cameroonian struggle by the Anglophobic Ahidjo regime and its French masters. Having switched his loyalty to the glory of naked power in the French-backed regime overseeing the genocide of the union-nationalist forces in Cameroon, Paul Biya quickly won the hearts of his patron to become prime minister in 1972 and later president in 1982. After that, he shed all aspects of his ties to Cameroonian nationalism and became a fervent Francophile and Anglophone manipulator. Today, it is clear for all to see that Paul Biya stands as the leader of the renegade forces that may eventually kill Cameroonian nationalism and lead the nation into abyss, denying it the realization of its century old Cameroonian dream of unity, independence, prosperity and open opportunities. He is a purposeless, faceless and paranoiac leader whose long years of power and the emptiness of his rule have been masked by France and his Cameroonian collaborators.

During his early years as head of state, Paul Biya talked of rigor in the implementation of progressive work ethics, rules, laws, freedom, Human rights and economic reforms, when he never intended to see the slightest change in the French imposed system he inherited from his predecessor. Biya never had any intention to change the course of dictatorship, corruption, kleptomania and division that was the rule of the system and the trappings of power and wealth it offered. A decade after his pronouncement of rigor, Cameroon which had the second fastest economic growth rate in the world after South Korea in 1986( though it lagged behind its true potentials even then), is today with the least promising economy in Africa.

Biya’s moralization rhetoric is an unacceptable abuse to humanity. Promising to make his rule a moral one where governance would be based on a program to enhance the right conducts in public, social, economic and political affairs, he reneged by presiding over the worst degeneration of a non-war ravaged nation in Africa.

Unfortunately, for Cameroonians, Biya is one of those regrettable products of nature with quite an exceptional strength of character that is a negation of a good leadership. It does not bother him in the least that his practically wrong actions and leadership has reduced Cameroonians into a poverty-stricken people, eroded their sense of purpose, divided their ranks, rendered them into the grips of despondence, denigrated their influence in national and international politics, and encouraged corruption to the form of an art; and above all, it suits his propose that he has wrapped Cameroon into the clutch and whims of France.

After becoming the president in 1982, Biya has ruled Cameroon more like an absentee caretaker than even an absentee landlord. A two-month trip abroad for amusement using the taxpayer’s money is unprecedented from any head of state. Nevertheless, it surprises only those who have no insight into his personality. Biya committed moral suicide years ago and now lacks the morality that is expected from a head of state. His rule has shattered the bilateral respect that prevailed between the different generations.

From peasant origins, Biya has learnt, but wrongly assimilated aristocratic values. The sad result of this is his blatant and unjustifiable contempt of the masses from where he had his origins. As a man of high learning, it is unfortunate that despite his long years of service in the system, he still possesses all the traits of a pseudo-intellectual and a pedant. And it is due to his awareness of his intellectual feebleness that he has developed a masked inferiority complex. That is why he rejects, snubs and shies away from the good ideas of his intellectual superiors.

Cameroon is the only nation in Africa where its true liberation fighters and nationalists were never permitted to the helm of power. It is the first nation in Africa where France became deeply involved in collaboration with Ahidjo, in the genocide of those who resisted its deception (close to a million deaths in the 1956-1970 war against the UPC). Cameroon is the only country in Africa, which has been the most cruelly raped in our modern times by France. Even though Cameroonians are one of the most dynamic people in the continent, they have never been left to their devices to harness their potentials and build their country into the great nation that it truly deserves. Instead, Cameroonians have been brought low by a conspiracy hatched during the years of Jacques Foccart’s control of French policy on Africa, a conspiracy that has effectively used Cameroonian collaborators, especially Paul Biya.

It does not bother the second Cameroonian president in the least that the Cameroonian people are suffocating in his bondage. He has lost touch with the Cameroonian masses, the Cameroonian reality and life in its different forms. However, unlike his psychopathic counterpart, the Roman emperor Nero, he has mastered one art―the art of retaining power despite the opposition from the masses. And as most megalomaniacs and experimentalists, he would continue to experiment with his theory of power retention, despite his unpopularity, not worried that the Cameroonian people are being dragged into abyss in the process.

Biya is performing his theory of power retention on us, an experiment that will go a long way to destroy the best of our creative forces if left to persist. Moreover, with that will be the destruction of the faith we have in our dream and worst still the mother of progress, which is hope. The sad result of the disaster of Biya’s rule would be the death of Cameroon. To the rational mind, that is unacceptable.

Perhaps for a little while longer, the living specter of the second Cameroonian president will continue to haunt the people―treacherous in his ways, ruthless in his methods and nonchalant in his views. It is our unavoidable task, if only for the sake of our children, that we rise up ― take back our dignity, hope and future from him and his patrons. Then following the natural course of history, we shall confine him and his legacy to the dustbin of history.

February 28, 1995 Janvier Tchouteu

AFRICA’S HAUNTED HEART

A specter looms in the lives of every Cameroonian child, man or woman. It is the living president of the land in the middle of Africa, the land that is often referred to as the microcosm of the continent. The specter is President Paul Biya of Cameroon. When rumors spread like wildfire in June 2004 that he had just died, there were widespread scenes of jubilation all across the half a million square kilometer landmass called Cameroon. Days after the circulation of the unverified account, he returned home from abroad where he had been passing his time, intermittently, about six months every year for over two decades, and then declared to the sycophants waiting to receive him at the airport that there would be a …. “Rendez-vous in 20 years’ time with those who wish me dead…”

Cameroonians were not the only ones who disbelieved him when he made that pronouncement among other things. Many of those who follow political developments in the world in general, and in Africa and Cameroon in particular, marveled at his audacity. After all, more than 80% of the Cameroonian population loathed his rule; he was already in power for more than two decades as the head of state, after having been the country’s prime minister (1972-1982) or the second most powerful person in the system put in place in Cameroon by the French overlords.

But Paul Biya proved everyone wrong. He pulled off another electoral charade and declared himself the winner in the October 2004 presidential election, and then changed his constitution in 2008 that would allow him to run for two more presidential 7-year terms (despite the deaths of 150 protesting Cameroonians caused by his armed forces), meaning that he could be president until the year 2025 (a record 43 years in power) when he would be 92 years of age.

That explains why by the time Paul Biya held another masquerade called presidential elections in October 2011, he had already successfully humbled the internationally recognized opposition heads (who are all former members of the country’s sole political party from 1972-1990, a party Biya has been leading since 1984), promised to give them positions in his government and made it known in plain terms that the system string-controlled by the puppeteer (France) would never allow political change in Cameroon that would curtail France’s unrestricted interests in the African country.

The octogenarian Paul Biya is variously described as the Maradona (he fakes and wins elections just like Maradona faked and scored a goal in his “Hand of God” goal) of Cameroonian and African politics, the master of presidential patricide (he devoured his predecessor who passed over power to him, leading to the first Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo’s exile, death and burial abroad—Senegal), the absentee president, the vindictive president, the evil president, etc. etc.

As a German colony from 1884-1916, Kamerun was often referred to by the German Colonial administration and the imperial-minded in the Kaiser’s Germany as an “African Pearl”, owing to the colony’s robust economy, highest literacy rate in the continent in the early 1900s, magnificent physical features, rich and varied vegetation cover, and also owing to its diverse ethnic ethnicities that included all the major language groups in Africa (Afro-Asia, Niger-Congo-A, Niger-Congo-B or Bantu, and Nilo-Saharan. In fact, historians consider the German colony of Kamerun as a major part of Adolf Hitler’s rue over the territories Germany lost after the First World because of the peace terms imposed on it by the victories Allied Powers during the Versailles Conference. As it happens, one of the peace terms imposed on the post-Kaiser Germany was the loss of German Kamerun to Britain and France. That was how Kamerun was partitioned into British Cameroons and French Cameroun.

As a matter of fact, the French Cameroun mandate became France’s most valuable assert in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its value was validated even further when the territory became the Launchpad of French General Charles De Gaulle-led Free French Forces that wrestled French Equatorial Africa from the Nazi puppet regime of Vichy France during the Second World War. This force would gallantly fight alongside Allied Forces against Italian and German forces in Libya, Tunisia and the Middle East, before carrying on to Italy and France where their biggest achievement was the liberation of Paris. The fact that French Camerounians played an invaluable role in the war effort to liberate France from Nazi Germany makes the explanation simple as to why French Camerounian soldiers returned home and sought self-government, liberty, democracy, reunification with British Cameroons that would culminate in the independence of the two United Nations Trust Territories. They were merely seeking the rights that they had helped France to regain from Nazi Germany, which is why pundits were not surprised at all.

The formation of the UPC (Union of the Populations of the Camerouns) in French Cameroun in 1946 and the birth of sister union-nationalist (civic-nationalist) parties in British Cameroons highlighted the seriousness of the former Kamerunians to work together to build a “New Cameroon”. By 1955, the UPC commanded more than 80% of popular support in French Cameroun.

So pundits considered it foolhardy when the French government issued a decree banning the UPC on July 13, 1955 in French Camerouns, a strategic act that was followed by the party’s ban in British Cameroons three years later on the same fabricated charges of inciting violence and for being communists. These coordinated moves by Africa’s two foremost colonial masters at the time was supposed to spell disaster for the dream held by Cameroon’s leaders. Many Cameroonians saw nothing but duplicity and hypocrisy in the moves, wondering whether the freedom they had assisted the Free French Forces to achieve for France and its citizens was a special right or privilege meant for “White People” only.

When in 1956, the UPC resorted to a partisan war of liberation from French rule, it was a belated move to confront France after failing to resolve the ban in a peaceful manner. That war would end with the defeat of the UPC in 1970, a defeat that came with the assassinations and execution of the party’s successive heads in 1958, 1960 and 1971, i.e., the deaths of Ruben Um Nyobe, Dr. Felix Moumie and Ernest Ouandie respectively. It would leave Cameroon entrapped through a French-imposed system rooted in the Colonial Pact France made its puppets sign before allowing their countries to become members of the United Nations Organization by granting these former colonies string-controlled independence.

Despite the period of instability during the country’s unsuccessful war of liberation that saw the French Trusteeship masters handing power to those who never asked for or never fought for it (the puppets that constitute the system today), despite the eventual peaceful reunification of British Southern Cameroons with the former French Cameroun, despite Cameroon’s agricultural recovery and the discovery of oil in the 1970s that saw the country emerge as Africa’s eight largest economy and the world’s second fastest growing in the early 1980s, Cameroon is today in a horrible shape.

The Cameroonian economy that was expected to grow twenty times over the next thirty years, i.e., from 1982-2012, barely doubled over that period of time. Everything changed for the worse after Paul Biya was handed power in November 1982 by the first French-installed puppet Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo. Since then, Cameroon has experienced the biggest proportionate embezzlement of state funds ever recorded in Africa. And the country holds the sad record as the country in Africa that has experienced the worst peacetime impoverishment since 1960.

Today, president Paul Biya is presiding over a nation where more than 80% of its physicians are abroad, where more than 90% of its doctorate degree holders are abroad, where Cameroonians invest abroad more than at home, where Cameroonians are voting against the system with their feet; today, Cameroon’s neighbors who before envied its high standards of living and saw it as a place of refuge and opportunities, now find Cameroonians envying them as they forge ahead with a sense of direction while Cameroon lags behind in its spiral towards total, complete and horrifying economic, social and political decay.

People unfamiliar with the Cameroonian situation would be wondering why such an abysmal situation persists. Well; the answer is simple. Cameroon finds itself today in a situation like someone in a quicksand because of the anachronistic system put in place by Gaullist France when General Charles De Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and decided to make France's former colonies and territories members of the United Nations Organization (UNO), while controlling them with transparent or invisible strings this time. French Cameroun and British Southern Cameroons achieved independence and reunification all right, only for the people to find that the new country is quasi-independent under a broader French template of control variously described as FrancAfrique. This French-imposed system has traumatized, demoralized, divided and dehumanized the Cameroonian people over the years.

The Gaullist system in place put in place by the elites of the French political establishment has as one of its major objectives the exclusion from Cameroon’s political power of the union-nationalists advocating for the reunification and independence of the divided territories of the former German Kamerun, civic nationalists who commanded the support of more than 80% of the populations of both territories of British Cameroons and French Cameroun in the 1950s and 1960s. The current system in Cameroon is a partnership of French imperial interest in Africa (economic and political) otherwise known as FrancAfrique and its Cameroonian collaborators (the renegades and anti-union-nationalists who never opposed and who do not object to France’s neo-colonial stranglehold of Cameroon).

The system has been effective in infecting the minds of many Cameroonians, reducing them into a state of hopelessness, in a process that lures them to direct their energy not against the Biya regime and the system, but at their neighbors. The system has successfully elevated corruption and the divide-and-rule strategy into an art—it has promoted the notion of settlers and indigenes, it has encouraged ethno-centrism, tribalism, clannishness, regional jingoism, sectarianism and other forms of division. We see a total and complete absence of strategic or even tactical planning when it comes to the economic and social development of the nation. We see a complete absence of social solidarity.

To compound the division and confusion among the people who reject the Biya regime and the French-imposed system, the so-called opposition leaders these freedom-craving Cameroonians had been looking up to have now been absorbed back into the system, leaving the struggling Cameroonian masses distrustful of politicians in general. Today, the down-trodden Cameroonian people are in a state of political lethargy.

When Paul Biya called for the holding of senate elections in April 2013, eighteen years after his parliament promulgated a law to create one, most Cameroonians thought it would be another charade, as usual. It made no sense for the so-called opposition parties with a semblance of representation in parliament to glorify the charade with their participation. Most Cameroonians knew the system was sustaining these so-called opposition leaders financially and that some of them were in the government, but Cameroonians were not prepared for the extent to which these politicians would go to insult their intelligence. But deals between the ruling party and the opposition were made all right. The electoral masquerade took place and the people saw the ruling party campaigning for the so-called main opposition party (Social Democratic Front—SDF) in some regions of the country, while the SDF in the words of its chairman or president John Fru Ndi “…one good turn deserves another...”, openly backed the ruling party, thereby ensuring its victory in other regions of the country.

How could that have happened? Politically-shocked Cameroonians have been asking themselves ever since the open fornication between the ruling party and the so-called opposition political parties in April 2013.

To prevent chaos and ensure a smooth succession, SDF spokes-persons and apologists quip.

“Paul Biya has a deal with the SDF to hand over power to one of its members,” some anonymous voices within the SDF echo.

If you ask me, my answer is clear. What was supposed to be a Cameroonian revolution that began on May 26, 1990, became a political comedy played by former members of the French-imposed system or political establishment, a political comedy that has gone full circle. The worldwide wind of change generated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika that swept away authoritarian systems in Eastern Europe and Africa, and that stirred the vast majority of Cameroonians in the 1990s to risk their lives in the streets demanding political change, was effectively controlled by the system. The desire for change that more than 80% of Cameroonians have has been hijacked by the authoritarian system in Cameroon and the so-called leaders of the opposition. The people got taken for a ride.

The biggest mistake made by Cameroonians was that when the clamor for change began, they followed Cameroonians who had no democratic credentials, people who hardly a year before were in the upper echelons of power in the system, but who at the time claimed they had left the ruling party and now opposed it. All the so-called heads of what the world knows today as the prominent opposition parties in Cameroon (John Fru Ndi of the SDF, Bello Bouba Maigari of the UNDP, Ndam Njoya of the CDU etc.) were members of the ruling party right up to the year 1990, when the system was forced to accept multi-party politics in Cameroon. Like the Pied Piper, these so-called opposition leaders lured freedom-starved Cameroonians into greater despondence and political lethargy. Such a feat was achieved only because Cameroonian liberals, union-nationalists, revolutionaries, democrats and patriots who had always rejected the system, thought these so-called heads of the so-called new opposition, these people who were the first to make the moves to create political parties, shared the vision of the “New Cameroon” that Cameroonians fought, died and voted for, a vision that achieved the land's reunification and independence (though it has never been real because it got usurped by the evil system that today is under the leadership of Paul Biya and his French puppeteers.), but that is yet to realize democracy, freedom, liberalism, progress, justice, equality and development.

False are the statements by members of the compromised opposition that had they not openly embraced the Biya regime and the system, chaos would have ensued in Cameroon incase Biya exited the political scene. There is no truth in the statement because the system in Cameroon is authoritarian, not autocratic.

Authoritarian regimes are usually coated with a sublime idea that could be political (Stalinism/Marxism/Communism, Fascism etc.), that could be religious (Iranian and Taliban theocracy etc.) or that could be an interest arrangement (FrancAfrique). In Cameroon, the system is built around preventing those who believe in the Cameroonian struggle (the union-nationalists, otherwise called the Kamerunists) from attaining power.

The system in Cameroon is a collection of individual interest groups, bringing together the propagators of French neo-colonialism and their Cameroonian collaborators. Paul Biya is the head of the collaborationists. And in many ways, he has been acting over the years as an absentee president. Meanwhile, the state has been functioning zombie-like during his quasi-presence. As a matter of fact, even though the mortifying arrangement suited the interest of the puppeteers and the beneficiaries of the system, it exposed the system to popular uprisings since that means the beneficiaries of the system are not clearly or functionally organized. With the advent of social media, globalization, the maturity of post-independence generations that never benefited from the system; and with the soldiers of the 1990s phase of the struggle dissociating themselves from the so-called opposition leaders, the authoritarian system now finds itself even more vulnerable.

The authoritarian system would be faced by a new political force that never associated itself with the system, a new political force that embodies the spirit of the century old struggle for the “NEW KAMERUN” or “NEW CAMEROON” that confronted German colonial control, stood up to French duplicity in the land in a war that decimated more than half a million of its supporters; the authoritarian system would be faced by a new force that embraces the legacy of those who fought, died and voted for the independence and reunification of Cameroon, a new force that rejects all the values of the system that the French political mafia over Africa put in place in their game plan to control the destiny of Cameroon, a six-decade old evil system that can only lead the country to abyss.

Now, as the open and hidden collaborators of the system openly embrace one another (the ruling party and the so-called heads of the so-called opposition parties) starting with the recent senatorial charade where the so-called principal opposition—the Social Democratic Front (SDF) and the party of Paul Biya—Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) supported each other’s aspirations in agreed-upon provinces with guaranteed votes from party members, the system is encouraging the creation of elite groups of beneficiaries who see or think that their political and economic survival rests only in a continuation or sustenance of the system. We are observing the evolvement of a system that is shedding any pretense of limited political pluralism; we are observing the entrenchment of a system that openly views the people as its number one enemy. Such a system then becomes autocratic.

In a nutshell, Cameroon’s so-called opposition political parties that are in symbiosis with the authoritarian system are aiding the system in its gradual transition into an autocratic system, thereby ensuring its survival in a morphed form. The rapidly changing system needs a strong man to be truly autocratic. This would be someone who has hands on the job to act as the president, someone who the French puppeteers would like to portray as the benevolent despot.

As Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany said, “The concept of the benevolent dictator, just like the concepts of the noble thief or the honest whore, is no more than a meaningless fantasy.”

It is the place of post-independence Cameroonians to reject whatever farce the system comes up with as change whenever power passes down to the generation after Paul Biya. By absorbing former members of his party who for decades identified with the opposition, Biya is trying to give Cameroonians and the rest of the world the impression that Cameroon’s opposition is in sync with his vision for the political evolution of Cameroon. Unfortunately, the system does not intend to let the majority of Cameroonians participate or have a say in Cameroon’s political development or evolution.

The New Cameroon will be founded. Not by beneficiaries of the system (past and present) but by those who have always rejected it as an evil system that has been leading Cameroon into abyss.

But then, in founding the New Cameroon, patriotic, honest, democratic, unbiased and progressive minded Cameroonians would have to reconcile a country where:

the system made sure that most of its historic figures who dedicated their lives and even died for the cause for Cameroon's reunification and independence got killed and buried like dogs at home and abroad,
the bodies of some of these historic figures that got buried abroad are missing,
a few of the historic figures who thought they could contribute in nation-building got sidelined, cowed and humiliated by the system,
its first head of state died and is buried abroad,
and where the people have been insulted for more than five decades by the regimes of Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya through an imposed minority system that sowed the seeds of division, corruption, mediocrity, fear and despondence that are haunting Cameroon today.

The ideas and ideals of the New Cameroon hatched by the country's historic civic-nationalists and developed over the years by post-independence union-nationalists is Cameroon's only bargain with the future. It is the only nucleus around which Cameroon can reconcile with its turbulent past; it is the nucleus that all the strata of Cameroonian society can connect to in the process of nation building; it is the only nucleus around which a free, democratic, liberal, fair and prosperous Cameroon can be built. The New Cameroon would lead the country in taking its merited place in the central African region, Africa as a whole, and the world at large. That would be possible only if we confine the legacies of the Ahidjo/Biya regimes and the suffocating French-imposed system to the dustbin of history.

Janvier Tchouteu 06/04/2013

THE DEMANDING TASK FOR THE POST-INDEPENDENCE GENERATIONS

The principal problem weighing hard on the general psychology of the majority of the peoples of Cameroon and Africa today is the worry of the path their frustrated, disillusion and dehumanized children would take to advance their wellbeing. By the word children, I mean those born just before and after the years of independence for many African countries in the early 1960s. This is a generation that was born in the atmosphere of hope and expectations that had gripped Cameroon and Africa just before and just after independence, a positive feeling based on recently realized reunification and independence made all the more dazzling by the goals harangued by its leaders.

However, getting to four decades after, we are still nowhere close to the dreams that had sustained our hopes. Poverty, disease, illiteracy, repression, ethnic divisions, corruption, underdevelopment and external domination still plague us, and in many aspects, even worse than before independence. Yet, we thought that ridding ourselves of colonialism through quasi-independence would automatically give birth to the broom that would clear up all aspects of our underdevelopment. Our post-independence leadership and pseudo-intellectuals fooled us because they lacked the will and vision to utilize the potentials of the lands they were leading. They failed us by not mastering the Archimedean point of our underdevelopment and development potentials. The self-serving systems put in place by colonial masters like France and the lever they conceived and hoped to spin the different African countries to greater heights was a reflection of their egos and delusions than of their intelligence, will and rationale.

In Cameroon today, we are faced by the colossal task of starting from the scratch, which involves demolishing the failed and unprogressive anti-democratic and exploitative French-imposed system and putting in place a new, progressive and compatible system that would be the reflection of the original goals of Cameroon’s union-nationalism and the genuine aspirations of the people. This would be a system that would place the country firmly among the community of progressive, democratic, representative, enlightened and advanced nations.

Today, the history of humanity has reached that great scale of change where the key words of technological progress, freedom, liberty, development, solidarity and integration are making great strides to be parts of our everyday lives. It has been observed with clarity that the Cameroonian people are being left behind in this great advancement of humanity because of the selfish objectives and actions of the oligarchy that stays in power through the deceptive French-imposed system. This autocratic, minority, pseudo-representative, corrupt and unpatriotic regime cannot alleviate the poverty, disease, despair, illiteracy, corruption, rising ethno-centrism, brain drain and incomprehension that against the sake of humanity is being accepted as part of our everyday lives. The unacceptable nature of the five-decade system can best be explained by Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev’s denunciation of autocracy:

On the side of the government, there are only the scoundrels bought with money squeezed by fraud and violence from the poor. On the side of the people, there is all that is fresh and youthful, all that can think and doing. What is dead and rotten (the autocratic government) must of itself fall into the grave. All we have to do is give it the final push and cover the stinking corpse with dirt.

Comparing Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev’s observation with the Cameroonian reality, we would realize with clarity that getting rid of all aspects of this French-imposed autocratic and oligarchic system is our first task. It is only after the complete and irrevocable burial of absolutism shall it be possible for us to set aside our despairs and harness our hopes, strengths, determinations and potentials to realize the all-embracing dream for a great Cameroon and Africa. It would be a hard and merciless task, but the only path that that would lead to our salvation.

This demanding task is especially on the shoulders of Cameroonians of the post-independence generations. It is from their ranks that the forces, backing and attention to realize the dream of the New Cameroon would rest. These forces would be the workers (agricultural, industrial and service or tertiary), the intellectuals, academicians, politicians, religious bodies, civil movements, artists, business class, functionaries, students and even the unemployed. Cameroonians would be led by the advanced representatives who would have mastered the selfless, humanizing, unifying and progressive principles and goals of the country’s national idea embodied in its Union-Nationalism and the basic tenets of its social and democratic program. It is through its union-nationalism that Cameroonians would realize the historic mission providence had placed on their shoulders for their well-being and the advancement of the nation and Africa.

We shall be able to boast that we have established the foundation of the New Cameroon, one that is capable of marching forward along the road of the democratic tenets of its union-nationalism that has been revised over the years and found to be compatible with progressive world ideas only when:

· The advanced representatives of the various forces would have made the new and humanized Cameroonian ideal to be widespread.

· They would have realized enduring organization, order, competency, discipline and self-discipline within their ranks.

· They would have extended their arms beyond their confines to consolidate the harmonious cooperation of all the development forces of the land.

It would be on this foundation that we shall transform the present anachronistic system into a modern, progressive and technologically oriented one; and then invest new ideas, know-how and efforts to build a great producing nation that shall ensure accountability and an efficient production, distribution and service network. As an indispensable part of this advanced system would be the justifiable social benefits—eradication of poverty, elimination of poor housing and housing shortages, reduction of diseases to acceptable limits, good sanitation and the provision of the necessary amenities and modern infrastructure.

Politically, this advanced, humanized and progressive system would ensure the total, complete and universal human rights of its citizens. It would be the upholder of their rights, pride, freedom and equality, a commitment that shall ensure the prevalence of a democracy that is truly compatible with the Cameroonian reality, one that shall ensure the eternal burial of absolutism. This modern, progressive and advanced system shall direct the Cameroonian people in cooperation with the progressive forces of other African countries towards the realization of their fraternal dream of harmony—the actualization of the economic union and political integration of Africa. It is along this path of our union-nationalism that we shall realize the all-embracing-century old Cameroonian dream and be led towards the all-embracing junction that shall realize Africa’s unity through the harmonious cooperation of its union forces. It would be at this stage that Cameroon and Africa shall take their merited places in the world community, while working with other worldly forces to make this world safe and conducive for our children. This extended task is entirely on the shoulders of the post-independence generations.

JANVIER TCHOUTEU FERUARY 15, 1995

THE MISTAKES TO BE AVOIDED IN BUILDING THE NEW CAMEROON

The demanding task confronting union-nationalists today is the realization of the New Cameroon, which entails the effective utilization of new, modern and progressive ideas and technology to build a modern economic, political and social system. The initial stage of realizing the New Cameroon involves the all-colossal task of overcoming the conservative, reactionary, corrupt, discriminatory, repressive and oppressive forces that constitute the system that has the lever of power. This anachronistic alien system is determined not to allow the change that the majority of Cameroonians are craving for. The system I am talking about is made up of the imperialistic lords in the French powerhouse and their puppets and collaborators in Cameroon. The image of that anachronistic system today is the Biya regime.

Most, if not all union-nationalists have a clear notion of what to expect out of a New Cameroon that would have to emerge from the current system. But many Cameroonians are incoherent when it comes to:

· The path to take to overcome the initial obstacles of the system and the Biya regime

· And the extent to go to build the New Cameroon of our dreams

In building the New Cameroon after getting rid of the legacy of the forces of oppression and suppression against the people, Cameroonian union-nationalists would be confronted by the all colossal task of molding a New Cameroonian mentality devoid of docility, corruption, discrimination and pessimism. That new mentality, which is an indispensable component of Cameroonian union-nationalism, would then resurface the best of our creative, dynamic and progressive potentials; and then harness and drive our strengths for an effective utilization of our resources and the great opportunities that abound in building the New Cameroon.

In the initial stage of ridding ourselves of the obstacles of the anachronistic French-imposed system under the Biya regime today, union-nationalists risk finding themselves derailed from their original ideals and dreams from divisions that might arise from their ranks and differences in the degree of commitment to the cause.

The fact that the obstacles union-nationalists would encounter in the various stages of the cause are so colossal, some union-nationalists may be tempted to react in two negative ways:

· Carry out makeshift changes and console themselves that they have done the job.

· Or exert too great a force in their over zealousness, which even though would destroy the obstacles to the New Cameroon, may also leave us on our knees, and perhaps render us incapable of building the New Cameroon of our dreams.

We should avoid these partial and blind commitments in our union-nationalism. Instead, rationalism should prevail in any action that we are taking or are about to take for the interest of Cameroon. That way, mistakes would be avoided.

Basically, the Cameroonian dream embodied in the ideals of its Union-Nationalism is the best rallying force for all Cameroonians. However, despite the genuine intentions and goodness of this ideal, its possible pervasion by mistakes or errors in the course of its application risks distorting the essence of the struggle, derailing the cause and discrediting the noble intentions of the century old Cameroonian dream by taking out the humanity from its fabrics and leaving it as any other dry-as-dust political ideology that humanity has rejected. The thought of the possible rejection of our Union-Nationalism because it has lost its humaneness is something we cannot afford, since that would mean the rejection of the Cameroonian dream and our collective hopes that have sustained us for close to a century. In order to avoid such a rejection, Cameroonian union-nationalists should avoid mistakes in the determining domains of the lives of the people.

1) Firstly, the fact that we are in a pathetic level of economic underdevelopment despite our enormous material and human resources may have created a complex based on despondence, something that many Cameroonians would have to overcome at the early stage of the task of building the New Cameroon by union-nationalists. The new union-nationalist government would have to come up with an immediate solution to erase that complex of despondence, an immediate solution that would require using our material and human resources that despite being in abundance are so disorganized, inefficient and disillusioned. Only through the path of a rapid improvisation and effective utilization of this underperforming human force for the optimal use of our material resources, shall we obtain an initial boost and solution that would do much to overcome the difficult initial period of fear and uncertainty. In its first step to overcome the initial obstacle caused by fear and uncertainty emanating from decades of division, corruption, repression, inefficiency and incompetence, the new union-nationalists government would have to instill administrative efficiency into the transforming system and provide competent and sufficient managers at all or most of the strategic and potentially cumulative sectors of the economy. This would ensure a quick initial boost to the economy and restore confidence in its management and direction. Such a positive step would direct the Cameroonian economy forward towards efficiency in the management and utilization of our human and material resources, drawing strength from the spread effects of the initial actions and direction.

2) This economic readjustment must be immediately and closely followed by political liberalization through the establishment of a truly progressive democratic tradition. The progressive democratic tradition should be one that would ensure the total, complete and universal human rights of its citizens and accept their rational freedom, liberty and equality. It should be compatible with the complex Cameroonian reality and should be capable of ensuring the harmonious cooperation of all the Cameroonian forces and entities in the development of the land. Then, through the natural checks and balances of nature, the new and rational democratic tradition shall ensure the complete and irreversible burial of the dictatorship that resulted to bureaucracy and incompetence, the bureaucracy and incompetence that nurtured a culture of corruption and discrimination which we know are the vices that eroded morality, trust and cooperation between the different forces in Cameroon. The positive outcome of this democratic tradition would be our break with underdevelopment. Simply, it is only after the realization of this clean democratic atmosphere to buttress the new economic drive shall there be a clear prospect of sustainable prosperity looming ahead.

3) The New Cameroon would also need a new culture in order to advance into the modern age through a new economic policy and a new democratic tradition. This new culture does not presuppose the destruction of the old ones or the implementation of uniformity, but rather advocates a metamorphosis based on the lessons of the past and today, to a new freedom and creativity that is compatible with modern civilization. The new culture would set the pace for progress by making the best out of our recent and distant pasts. It would not imitate the past with all its constraints and irreconcilable diversity. The new culture would create uniformity out of diversity rather than propagate diversity to maintain differences. The propagation of differences that does not enhance the wellbeing of the nation is static diversity or conservatism in its worst forms. It stands as an obstacle to progress and a death-embrace with the past. This avoidable static diversity rejects technological civilization, something that the New Cameroon cannot afford to do without. The result of accepting static diversity would be that the traditional concepts of a family, a tribe, an ethnic group, a social organization, social norms, religious views, economic life, a linguistic entity and even a race, would prevent us from moving along with the changing times. Some of the consequences of accepting static diversity would be:

· We would not manage birth rates to match our potentials.

· We would not soberly review or revise our anachronistic traditional and religious beliefs to accommodate the demands of our times and the challenges of the future.

· And finally, we would not be able to accept the advantages of technological progress that are indispensable in our drive to attain great economic heights, which is a major prerequisite in the realization of the Cameroonian dream.

Abraham Lincoln railed against conservatism or static diversity when he said that:

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried”

The quest for the New Cameroon is a rejection of our horrible past and an embrace of a future that would guarantee progress, freedom, liberty, development, harmony, peace, unity, integrity and democracy for all Cameroonians. It is our bargain to become a cherished part of the future economically united and politically integrated Africa. And above all, it is our manifestation to have a place among the community of civilized nations.

Even Karl Marx rejected the dead weight of the past in his writings when he pointed out that:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly given and transmitted from the past. The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the living. And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they conjure up the spirits of the past to their services and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in time honored disguise and this borrowed language.

Yes, Cameroonian Union-Nationalism was born from the shortcomings of the past nine decades of our past. It has been tragic. Nevertheless, great lights were revealed, enlightening figures that as leaders of our civic-nationalism sustained the spirit of the Cameroonian dream. However, despite their tremendous role, Cameroonian union-nationalists should be sober enough and avoid living and thinking behind the times, as if they are still haunted by the defeats suffered over the century. We should not conjure or imitate the past in our efforts to reorganize our lives and build the New Cameroon. Our cultures and traditions should be invoked only to help in providing guidelines in bringing progress and in bringing forth to life individuals who through modern technological uniformity would contribute to new cultures that would accommodate modern demands and reality. These new cultures should be capable of burying the inherent traits of despotism in our pasts while promoting freedom of choice, openness and creativity.

4) Another mistake to be avoided by the New Cameroon would be blind nationalism. This may sound intriguing since the force to lead the realization of the New Cameroon would be led by union-nationalists. Yes, Cameroon’s union-nationalists are modernists and unifiers in their civic-nationalism, based on an ideal to bring diverse people together by harnessing their compatibilities. Cameroon's union-nationalists are opposed to fundamental nationalists, ethnic nationalists, assimilative nationalists and ultra-nationalists with ideologies that exclude and stress on differences. The prefix “Union” attached to our nationalism indicates that we are out to include in the furthest extent of the word, rather than exclude, but in a manner that recognizes the legitimate interests of the constituent peoples that make the Cameroonian state and their rights to their freedom, prosperity and destiny in cooperation with other forces of the world, but not in subjugation to any. Nevertheless, this spirit of our Union-Nationalism should not be overstretched to exceed rational bounds through exaltation because the regressive outcome of such blinding emotions would be xenophobia and internal discrimination. The repercussions from such an overstretched nationalism would be the loss of its union character. Such a distortion of our Union-Nationalism would impede our development and would give rise to a new political tradition that is not democratic and representative. Furthermore, any retrogression into blind nationalism from that shortfall would breed a new culture that would be out of touch with global civilization and technological uniformity. The mistake of transcending our Union-Nationalism is that we would be taking the humanity out of its fabrics, thereby leaving it as barren as a desert. The outcome of such a mistake would be the rejection of our advanced form of civic-nationalism and an eternal doubt in the noble intentions of the ideals of Cameroonian Union-nationalism. Such a rejection is something the forward-looking Cameroon cannot afford because it would mean the rejection of the idea that has guided and guarded Cameroonians in their century-old dream, a dream that sustained their hopes through tragic and turbulent times. In a nutshell, no blind form of nationalism should be allowed to distort the genuine and progressive purpose of Cameroonian Union-nationalism, the only advanced ideal that can realize our collective dreams. Union-nationalists should accept criticism and self-criticism as measures to prevent the derailment of the century-old ideal.

5) Should the forward-looking Cameroon look back at all? Yes, it should.

· However, the forward-looking Cameroon should not look back to the past to make it an integral part of the future; but rather it should regard the past as a guide, a lesson to learn from, but not a lesson to copy. The only aspect the forward-looking Cameroon must always look back at is the progress of the people. The forward moving Cameroon should always give a helping hand to those who fall or are being left behind in the forward drive of prosperity. The leadership of the New Cameroonian ideal would have to bear in mind all the time that the land they are leading has been borrowed from the younger generation(s) after them. With such a responsible mindset, the leadership would always jealously protect the land and ensure that our children are adequately educated, prepared, and are competitive and protected enough to take over and carry on with the virtues of the New Cameroon to secure a better future for their own children. That way, union-nationalists would be playing the roles of guarantors of continuity.

· Socially, the New Cameroon would have to equate the drive of prosperity with a rise in the standards of living of the struggling masses. Housing, schools, hospitals, electricity, water, roads, and other social and public infrastructures should never be allowed to lag behind our true progress and the changing times. Rational provisions should be put in place to take care of the handicapped, the old, the unfortunate and the underprivileged.

Colossal as the task may seem, it is realizable and it is our only bargain with our future. The New Cameroon would easily be realized after Cameroonians develop the sense of commitment and start feeling or considering themselves a part of the process of nation-building, development and prosperity. That would be at a time that our collective mentality and psychology would be capable of accommodating the new demands of the New Cameroon; that would be when union-nationalists and their advanced representatives would have become humanized enough to put the general purpose of our land above personal considerations. By so doing, we shall then consider the plight of our land and the Cameroonian people as issues that also concern us fundamentally. Then that way, Cameroonians shall have that sense of purpose, convinced that they have an appreciable role to play in building, protecting and sustaining the New Cameroon. With the realization of that collective progress, we shall be able to boast with certainty that we have built a new mentality that is collective, and that would greatly reduce or even eliminate corruption, racism, favoritism, tribalism, ethnocentrism, absolutism, inefficiency and bureaucracy. A sense of belonging and commitment is something union-nationalists must build in order to sustain the New Cameroon and its advanced ideals.

It may seem difficult if not impossible to realize a New Cameroon without going through all or some of the possible mistakes that might be committed as a result of inherent human weaknesses and a possible over-commitment or over-zealousness from union-nationalists. Nevertheless, if mistakes are likely to be made, we are expected to allow criticism as a norm in society and be self-critical ourselves. That entails being modest enough to ask ourselves whether we are wrong in each action we take, and if so, to admit the error(s) in our action(s) for correction. And after correcting the error(s), we should make the maximum effort to ensure that no more errors or mistakes are made.

Janvier Tchouteu May 1995

Maps

African Democracy Ratings

Partition Map of Africa: 1884-1914

Cameroon on a map of the world

Cameroon over time

German Kamerun I (1884-1911)
German Kamerun II (1911-1916)
British Cameroons & French Cameroun: 1916-1960
British Cameroons & La Republique du Cameroun (1960-1961)
British Southern Cameroons & La Republique du Cameroun (1960-1961)
Reunited/Independent Cameroon today.

Glossary on Cameroon

Adamawa	The southernmost province that was carved out of the former Grand North Province. It is a plateau region.
Akonolinga	A town in the Center Province. It is also the capital of the Nyong and Nfomou Division.
Ashia	Word used by both English and French speaking Cameroonians to express sympathy, condolence, consolation, encouragement, compassion, harmony, understanding, agreement, thankfulness and caution.
Bafang	The capital of Upper Nkam Division and a Bamileké realm in the West Province.
Bafaw	The principal ethnic group in the area that comprises the Kumba municipality. It is part of the larger Bantu group.
Bafoussam	The capital of the West Province and Mifi Division. Also a traditional Bamileké realm.
Bakweri	The principal ethnic group in the Fako Division, which is located in the Southwest Province. The Bakwerians are Bantu speaking of the Sawabantu subgroup.
Bamenda	Capital of the Northwest Province and Mezam Division.
Bami (Bamileké)	Diminutive of Bamileké.
Bamileké (Bami)	The most populous semi-Bantu ethnicity and the principal ethnic group in Cameroon. It is also their mother tongue.
Bamilekéland	The western half of the West Province, with fringes in the Northwest and Southwest Provinces. It comprises five administrative divisions, about ninety traditional realms and eleven dialectical groupings.
Bamoun	A semi-Bantu ethnicity and one of the principal ethnic groups in Cameroon. Also their mother tongue.
Bamounland	The Eastern half of the Western province.
Banganté	Largest Bamileké realm, capital of Nde Division, its former name. Found in the West Province.
Bantu	Large group of Negroid peoples of Central, South, and East Africa that inhabits the forests of the Southwest, Littoral, Center, South, and East Provinces of Cameroon. Also the largest constituent of the Negroid or Black race.
Bassa	Principal ethnic group in the Littoral Province. It is Bantu speaking. Also found in the Center Province of Cameroon.
Beti	Diminutive of Beti-Pahuin. It is also a subdivision of the Beti-Pahuin group of languages, and is broken down further into Ewondo, Eton, Bane, Mbida-Mbane and Mvog-Nyenge.
Beti-Pahuin	Diminuted or shortened to Beti, this group of related peoples constitute the third principal ethnic group in Cameroon. The ethnic homeland of the Beti-Pahuin people is in the Center and South Provinces, with fringes and enclaves in the East Province. They are Bantu-speaking and comprise the following: · Beti (Ewondo, Bane, Mbida-Mbane, Mvog-Nyenge, and Eton), · Fang (Fang proper, Ntumu, Mvae, and Okak) · Bulu (Bulu, Fong, Mvele, Zaman, Yebekanga, Yengono, Yembama, Yelinda, Yesum, and Yekebolo.) · Smaller tribes or ethnic groups Pahuinised by the Beti-Pahuins such as the Baka, Bamvele, Manguissa, Yekaba, Evuzok, Batchanga (Tsinga), Omvang, Yetude peoples. Beti-Pahuin people are also indigenous in Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and The Republic of Congo.
Betiland	The Beti-Pahuin speaking regions of Cameroon (stretches from the southern half of the Center Province, to the central and eastern parts of the South Province and extend as fringes into the Eastern province), Equatorial Guinea( Rio Muni), Gabon (the northern half), The Republic of Congo (the northwest), and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Biafra	The short-lived Ibo-dominated state that seceded from Nigeria during the 1966–1970 Nigerian Civil War.
British Cameroons	The western third of the former German Kamerun that fell under British control following the partition of the German colony. It comprised British Northern Cameroons and British Southern Cameroons.
Boumnyebel	A Bassa village in Nyong and Kelle Division, Center Province.
British Northern Cameroons	Northern half of British Cameroons that voted to unite with Nigeria in 1961, following the controversial United Nations plebiscite in the territory.
British Southern Cameroons	Southern half of British Cameroons. Became part of the Cameroon Federation in 1961 following a plebiscite that resulted in its reunification with the former French Cameroun. It comprises the Northwest and Southwest Provinces of Cameroon.
Buea	Capital town of the Southwest Province and former capital of German Kamerun.
Bulu	One of the peoples of the Beti-Fang ethnic group with homeland in the South Province.
Cameroonian Pidgin	Also called Cameroonian Creole or Kamtok, it is the Pidgin English spoken in Cameron. It has five variants.
CENER	(Center National des Etudes et de Recherché)—Acronym of Cameroon’s secret intelligence service (National Center for Studies and Research)—that was changed in 1984 to Direction Générale de la Recherché Extérieures (DGRE)—General Directorate for External Research.
Center Province	Central province of Cameroon. Comprises eight divisions.
CNU (Cameroon National Union)	Party formed in 1966 from the merger of the political parties operating in Cameroon. It was headed by first Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo.
CPDM (Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement)	The CNU renamed in 1985.
CU (Cameroon Union)	Party formed by Ahmadou Ahidjo.
Douala	Largest city, economic capital and capital of Wouri division and Littoral Province.
Duala	A Bantu-speaking people of the Sawabantu subgroup, they are the principal ethnic group of the Wouri Division and the Douala area.
East Cameroon	The French speaking federal unit of Cameroon from 1961–72. It was formed from the former French Cameroun.
East Province	The Southeastern half of Cameroon. The East Province has four divisions with Bertoua as its capital.
Eton	One of the peoples of the Beti-Fang ethnic group. Found in the Center Province.
Ewondo	One of the peoples of the Beti-Fang group. Found in the Center Province of Cameroon.
Extreme North	A province in the far North of Cameroon. It comprises six divisions.
Free French Forces	These were French and Francophone fighters who continued fighting the axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan, even after France surrendered and signed an armistice agreement with Nazi Germany in June 1940. It was formed by General Charles De Gaulle, who was a member of the French cabinet on official visit to Britain at the time of the surrender. General Charles De Gaulle strongly opposed French capitulation and the armistice signed by the new regime led by Marshall Petain that created the Vichy regime in the South of France, thereby allowing the North of the country to be under German occupation. He urged resistance against German control of France and its collaborationist Vichy puppets. The movement drew recruits mostly from the French empire, especially from French Central Africa, of which French Cameroun was the base at the time, under the new governorship of Jacques Philippe LeClerc. Philippe LeClerc led the Free French Forces’ first major victory in the war with the capture in 1941 of Kufra, a town in the then Italian colony of Libya. It incorporated forces of the former Vichy regime in the colonies from 1943, and saw its ranks swollen by Frenchmen after the D-Day landing. The Free French Forces achieved their greatest glory with the liberation of Paris in August 1944, led by the French 2nd Armored Division because it had the least number of blacks in its ranks. By the end of the war, The Free French Movement constituted the fourth largest military force in Europe, fighting against the Axis powers. The right wing political parties in France have been dominated by its members and the ideology of its founder called Gaullism.
Fulfulde (Fula, Pulaar, Pular, Peul)	A Sene-Gambian language spoken by the Fulani people.
Fulani (Fulani, Fula, Fellata or Peul)	A mixed Negro-Tuareg people inhabiting the Savannah from Sudan to Sene-Gambia, they comprise three groups namely: The Mbororo, Bororo, Burure or Abore who are pastoralists. The Fulanin Gida, Ndoowi’en or Magida, who are fully sedentary communities. The semi-sedentary Peul people who are agriculturalist and ultimately resume pastoralism, but often form permanent communities. Foulanis, Fulanis or Peuls are the second most populous ethnic group in Cameroon. Found mostly in the northern provinces of Adamawa, North and Extreme North. Their language is the lingua franca of this part of Cameroon.
Foumbam	Capital of the Noun Division and the Bamounland. Found in the West Province.
Foumbot	Agricultural settlement in the Noun Division.
French Cameroun	The Eastern two third of the former German Kamerun that fell under the control of the French following the partition of the German colony by Britain and France. It became a Frenchmandatory territory and later trust territory from 1918–1960.
Garoua	Capital of the North Province and Benue Division.
Graffi	Pidgin German word for grass field. Name often applied collectively to the semi-Bantu peoples of the Northwest and West Provinces of Cameroon.
Graffiland	Cameroonian word for Western High Plateau, Western Highlands, or Bamenda Grassfields. Mountainous grassland region of the Northwest and West Provinces of Cameroon. It comprises the Bamilekéland and Bamounland in the south, and the Ngembaland, Chambaland and Tikarland in the north.
Ibo	One of the four principal ethnic groups of Nigeria. Found in the southeast.
Idenau	A town in Fako Division, Southwest Province.
Kamveu	Local council of notables among the different Bamileké realms.
Koufra (Kufra)	An important but isolated Oasis settlement in the southeastern Libyan desert that was of strategic importance for the North African campaign during the Second World War. Its capture from the Italians by the Free French Forces marked the first major battle won by France in the war, thereby boosting General Charles De Gaulle’s prestige and the morale of the demoralized anti-Vichy forces.
Koutaba	A settlement in the Bamounland, Noun Division, West Province. Also a major military and air base in Cameroon,
Kumba	Largest city in the Southwest Province and capital of Meme Division. It is located about 70 miles north of Limbe.
KNDP (Cameroon National Democratic Party)	Nationalist party in British Cameroons. It led the campaign that realized the reunification of British Southern Cameroons with the former French Cameroun.
Limbe	Former Victoria. It is the capital of Fako Division in the Southwest Province.
Littoral	Coastal province of Cameroon. It consists of four divisions.
Loum	An agricultural town in the Mungo Division, in the north of the Littoral Province.
Maguida (Magida)	Name erroneously used for the peoples of the Moslem North that originated from the third group of Fulanis—the Fulanin Gida, comprising the fully sedentary Fulani communities.
Mamfe	Capital of Manyu Division in the Southwest Province.
Maroua	Capital of the Extreme North Province and Diamare Division.
Mayo Tsanaga	A division in the Extreme North Province of Cameroon.
Mayo Tsava	A division in the Extreme North Province of Cameroon.
Mbengwi	Capital of Momo Division in the Northwest Province.
Mboh	A Bantu-speaking people of the Mungo Division in the Littoral Province, with fringes of their homeland in the Southwest and Western provinces.
Mokolo	Capital of Mayo Tsanaga Division.
Molyko	A suburb of Buea in the Southwest Province.
Mora	Capital of Mayo Tsava Division.
Mutengene	A junction town to Limbe, Buea and Tiko, in Fako Division, Southwest Province.
Nde	Formerly called Banganté Division. It is found in the West Province of Cameroon.
Ngaoundéré	Capital of the Vina Division and Adamawa Province.
Ngemba	The second most populous peoples of the semi-Bantu group. The Ngemba peoples are found in the northern half of the Cameroon Grassland (Western Highlands), mostly in the Mezam and Momo Divisions of the Northwest Province. The Ngemba people related dialects.
Ngembaland	The southwestern part of the Northwest Province that is composed of several traditional realms or fondoms speaking closely related dialects.
Nkongsamba	Capital of the Mungo Division of Cameroon. It is also the largest city in the area.
North Province	Central of the Grand North Provinces. It comprises four divisions.
Northwest Province	A province from the former Federal unit of West Cameroon and the former territory of British Southern Cameroons. Peopled by semi-Bantu groups of Tikar, Ngemba and Chamba speakers. Their compatriots in the Southwest Province collectively call them ‘Graffis’.
OK (One Cameroon)	Offshoot of the UPC after it was also banned in British Cameroons.
Peul	A French term for Fulani borrowed from the Wolof language.
Semi-Bantu	The unique and unrelated peoples in Africa, comprising the Bamileké, Bamoun, Tikar, Ngemba and Chamba peoples.
Sokolo	A suburb in Limbe, Southwest Province.
South Province	Cameroon’s southern coastal province. It comprises the three divisions of Ntem, Ocean and Dja and Lobo.
Southwest Province	Southwestern coastal province of Cameroon. It has four divisions. Formerly a part of British Southern Cameroons and the federal unit of West Cameroon.
Tcholliré	Capital of Rey Bouba Division in the North Province.
Tiko	A coastal town in Fako Division in the Southwest Province.
Tonga	Bamileké settlement and realm in the Nde Division, West Province.
Tuareg	A Berber-speaking people of the Mazigh group inhabiting the central Sahara from Southern Algeria and Tripolitania in Libya, to the middle Niger and the northern borders of Nigeria. They moved to the interior of the Sahara desert to escape the Arab invasion of North Africa in the 7th and 8th century.
UPC (Union of the Populations of the Cameroons)	First national and nationalistic party in Cameroon. The historic UPC was formed in 1948. Banned in 1955, it resorted to armed struggle that continued well into the late 1960s.
Victoria	Former name of Limbe. Was founded in 1857 by missionaries for the settlement of rescued or freed slaves.
West Province	The southern half of the Western Highlands of Cameroon. It is populated by the Bamileké and Bamoun peoples. It is also Cameroon’s cultural and agricultural heartland, and is remembered for its historic role as the center of the country’s nationalism and liberation struggle against the French Army in the land. It comprises the six divisions of Bamboutous, Menoua, Mifi, Nde, Noun, and Upper Nkam.
Wum	Capital of Menchum Division in the Northwest Province.
Yaoundé	Cameroon’s second largest city and national capital. Also the capital of the Center Province and Nfoundi Division.

Titles by Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The Usurper: and Other Stories

Triple Agent, Double Cross

Disciples of Fortune

The Union Moujik

Splendid Comets

Flash of the Sun

Fortune Calls

Fortune’s Master

Fortune’s Children

The Norilsk Bears

To Be In Love and To Be Wise

The Fire and Ice Legend

The Sweetest Madness

The Grandmothers

The Hunger Fire

The Shades of Fire

Father and Sons

The Doctors

Dark Shades

Fateful Ties

The Verdict of Hades

His Majesty’s Trial

Ngoko’s Folly

The Usurper

The Dowry

I am Hated

The Oaf

Non-Fiction Titles by Janvier Chouteu-Chando

THEIR LAST STAND: Donald Trump’s Upset Victory…

BROKEN ENGAGEMENT: Why a Donald Trump Win…

Ukraine: The Tug-of-war between Russia and the West

Cameroon: The Haunted Heart of Africa

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

A Father and Son Joke

2016-11-25T13:57:00.002-08:00

"Who is this handsome man?" the little boy asks his mother, pointing at the picture of an athletic young man with a full head of dark, wavy hair.
"That’s your father," his mother says.
"Then who is that fat, bald man who lives with us?"

When Bad Habits Pay!

2016-11-25T13:56:00.002-08:00

"Can you spare some change?" a beggar asks a passerby.
"No, I know you’re going to spend it all on vodka."
"No, sir, I don’t drink."
"Then you’ll gamble it away."
"No, I don’t gamble either, sir."
"Well then, you’re going to spend it on women."
"No, sir, I don’t spend money on women."
"Okay," the passerby finally agrees. "I’m going to give you 100 rubles, if you come with me. I want to show my wife an example of what can happen to a man who has no bad habits."

A Father and Daughter Joke

2016-11-25T13:54:00.002-08:00

"Dad," a teenage girl says, running into her father’s den, "I’d like to kiss you good-bye before I go to school!"
"You’re too late, honey. Your mother just did that two minutes ago, and I don’t have any cash left on me.”

Conception, Perception and the Confessional

2016-11-25T13:53:00.003-08:00

A woman goes to confession:
"I’m so sinful, father!" she says.
"Tell me about your sins, daughter."
"Every time I look in the mirror I think, ‘I’m so beautiful, I’m so beautiful…’".
"Go in peace," the priest says. "It is no sin, my daughter, it is a delusion."

The Blessings of Marriage

2016-11-25T13:52:00.002-08:00

Two men, once close friends, meet after twenty years. One of them invites the other over to his house for a dinner. During dinner, the guest has to hide his surprise when he sees eighteen children in his friend’s house:
"You must be happy in your marriage; the house full of kids. Isn’t it nice!" the guest says to his friend when they step outside for a smoke.
"I wish. You don’t know my wife. She eats at me day and night."
"Then, why did you father so many kids?"
"Well, I figured it’s much easier to get lost in a crowd."