The Reunification Debate in British Southern Cameroons


Book Description

This book is a succinct account of the role immigrants from French Cameroon played in the Reunification politics in the Southern Cameroons. The study reveals that these "strangers" organised themselves in Pressure Groups in order to fight for equal opportunities with the indigenes and when such opportunities were not coming, they initiated the Reunification Idea, propagated it and converted many reluctant Southern Cameroonians. They militated in pro-reunification political parties such as the KNC, KNDP, UPC and OK and successfully shifted the reunification idea from the periphery to the centre of Southern Cameroons decolonisation politics. The immigrants convinced the UN through petitions and reunification which was the most unpopular option for independence became one of the two alternatives at the 1961 plebiscite. They and the reluctant KNDP campaigned and voted for it. The Reunification of Cameroon was therefore the handiwork of French Cameroon immigrants.




The Secrets of an Aborted Decolonisation


Book Description

Among the material are treaties concluded by Britain with Southern Cameroons coastal Kings and Chiefs; and the boundary treaties of the Southern Cameroons, treaties defining the frontiers with Nigeria to the west and the frontier with Cameroun Republic to the east. The book contains documents that attest to the Southern Cameroons as a fully self-governing country, ready for sovereign statehood. These include debates in the Southern Cameroons House of Assembly; and the various Constitutions of the Southern Cameroons. The book also reproduces British declassified documents on the Southern Cameroons covering the three critical years from 1959 to 1961, documents which speak to the inglorious stewardship of Great Britain in the Southern Cameroons. This book removes lingering doubts in some quarters that the people of the Southern Cameroons were cheated of independence. Its contents are further evidence of their inalienable right and sacred duty to assert their independence.




Negotiating an Anglophone Identity


Book Description

This study of Cameroon captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the growing disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. It focuses on the resistance of Anglophone Cameroonians to nationhood, which is being pursued to the detriment of minority identities.




Scribbles from the Den


Book Description

"49 insightful essays ... which originally appeared on his award-winning blog 'Scribbles from the den'"--Page 4 of cover




Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon


Book Description

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.




Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon


Book Description

Cameroon is a country endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals, substantial forests, and a dynamic population. It is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. Although Cameroon has made economic progress since independence, it has not been able to change the dependent nature of its economy. The economic situation combined with the dismal record of its political history, indicate that prospects for political stability, justice, and prosperity are dimmer than they have been for most of the country's independent existence. The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon has been updated to reflect advances in the study of Cameroon's history as well as to provide coverage of the years since the last edition. It relates the turbulent history of Cameroon through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Cameroon history from the earliest times to the present.




Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon


Book Description

Cameroon is a land of much promise, but a land of unfulfilled promises. It has the potential to be an economically developed and democratic society but the struggle to live up to its potential has not gone well. Since independence there have been only two presidents of Cameroon; the current one has been in office since 1982. Endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals and substantial forests, and a dynamic population, this is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. To all of this is recently added a serious terrorism problem, Boko Haram, in the north, a separatist movement in the Anglophone west, refugee influxes in the north and east, and bandits from the Central African Republic attacking eastern villages. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Republic of Cameroon.




Post-Colonial Cameroon


Book Description

In this unique volume, leading scholars examine how Cameroonians organize and experience their lives under Cameroonian leadership and local responses to that leadership. The volume offers essential case studies that allow us to examine the lives of ordinary people in post-colonial Africa through five lenses: politics, society and culture, economy, international relations, and migration. It places the nation’s contemporary challenges within a broader political, economic, and socio-cultural context, and uses that to make recommendations for future directions. The book also celebrates areas in which the country has done well and calls on its citizens to build on those achievements. This volume is forward-looking and as such raises important questions about issues of development, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, and class.




Routledge Handbook of Francophone Africa


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Francophone Africa brings together a multidisciplinary team of international experts to reflect on the history, politics, societies, and cultures of French-speaking parts of Africa. Consisting of approximately 35% of Africa’s territory, Francophone Africa is a shifting concept, with its roots in French and Belgian colonial rule. This handbook develops and problematizes the term, with thematic sections covering: Colonial and post-colonial ties between France and sub-Saharan Africa Belgium, Belgian colonialism and Africa The Maghreb African Francophones in France Francophone African literature and film ‘Francophone’ and ‘Anglophone’ Africa Beyond national boundaries and ‘colonial partners’ The chapters demonstrate the evolution of "Francophone Africa" into a multi-dimensional construct, with both a material and an imagined reality. Materially, it defines a regional territorial space that coexists with other conceptualisations of African space and borders. Conceptually, Francophone Africa constitutes a shared linguistic and cultural space within which collective memories are shared, not least through their connection to the French imperial imagination. Overall, the Handbook demonstrates that as global power structures and relations evolve, African agency is increasingly assertive in shaping French-African relations. Bringing this important debate together into a single volume, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students and scholars interested in Francophone Africa.




Petitioning for our Rights, Fighting for our Nation. The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949-1960


Book Description

Thousands of Cameroonian women played an essential role in the radically anti-colonial nationalist movement led by the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC): they were the women of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC). Drawing on women nationalists' petitions to the United Nations, one of the largest collections of political documents written by African women during the decolonization era, as well as archival research and oral interviews, this work shows how UDEFEC transcended ethnic, class, education and social divides, and popularized nationalism in both urban and rural areas through the Trust Territories of the Cameroons under French and British administration. Foregrounding issues such as economic autonomy and biological and agricultural fertility, UDEFEC politics wove anti-imperial democracy and notions of universal human rights into locally rooted political cultures and histories. UDEFEC's history sheds light on the essential components of women's successful political mobilization in Africa, and contributes to the discussion of women's involvement in nationalist movements in formerly colonized territories.




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