The Anglophone Question Vol 1

Praise

“The Anglophone Question cannot vanish by some political maneuver, as Cameroon’s senile nonagenarian president has done over the decades, with his ossified knee excruciatingly painful on the nation’s neck. That is my takeaway after reading this insightful, well-argued, exhaustively researched, highly intellectualized, yet practical compendium of chapters that bear an unapologetic witness to the horrific Anglophone Problem. I celebrate the authors’ fearlessness, articulation and lucid presentation as the establishment continues to seal its ears with candle wax. I’ll reverse President Paul Biya’s mantra and say: Rule 1: There is an Anglophone Problem. Rule 2: When in doubt, consult Rule 1.”
—Uche Onyebadi, PhD, Texas Christian University, Texas, USA

“The Anglophone Question & Postcolonial Hegemony in Cameroon cuts to the core of important questions at the intersection of colonial history, the United Nations’s framework for decolonization for former mandate territories, and postcolonial developments in Cameroon. With remarkable clarity and vision, the editor has assembled a wide array of distinctive contributions that are ethnographically dense and critical in situating and contextualizing the sociocultural, legal, and political complexities of nationalisms in the former British Southern Cameroons. These contributions hold significant value for scholars and students focused on postcolonial struggles for autonomy and self-determination in the two English-speaking/Pidgin-speaking territories of Cameroon, the North-West and South-West Regions. In a postcolonial moment marked by disillusionment and disaffection with state projects of nation-building, this volume deftly argues that Anglophone nationalism is a political response to a historical and ongoing colonial situation. The contributors in this volume convincingly document the experiences of a classic case of a situation coloniale for peoples of the former British Southern Cameroons. This colonial situation is the responsibility of a Francophone Cameroonian elite that has gradually pursued a hegemonic project of internal colonialism for more than half a century. This internal or decentralized colonialism is predicated on the accelerated extraction of resources in these two regions amidst a creeping but steady hollowing of sociocultural, economic, and political institutions of Anglophone identity in Cameroon. A great addition to the growing scholarship on Anglophone Cameroon, this book is also a brilliant contribution to new writing on decolonial thought, new nationalist movements, and the politics of separatist conflicts in Africa in the new century. It is a useful resource for scholars, students, and social justice activists advocating for minority rights and marginalized communities.”

—Rogers Orock, Africana Studies, Lafayette College
Co-editor of Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa (2021)