Navigating Cameroun – Part 1

When I say “navigating” I’m not talking about a canoe trip, but using the word in the sense of getting one’s head around something complex or difficult. (This is the sense in which John Mortimer uses the word “voyage” in the title of his deeply moving autobiographical play A Voyage Round My Father). For much of this three-part piece I shall have my tourist guide cap on. Cameroun is a country of outstanding natural beauty: breathtaking and very varied landscapes, amazing wildlife, and a wealth of cultural production—literature, fine arts, and, especially, music that is known all over the world (who has not heard of the late, great Manu Dibango?). In happier times, Cameroun could be a tourist hot-spot. But these are not happy times, even less happy for Cameroun than for the rest of this troubled world. It is a very complex country geographically and demographically and with a complex and bloody history. After the Pacific island nation Papua New Guinea, it has the second-highest language density in the world (language density being the number of distinct languages spoken per head of population). It had a complex and violent colonial history, being occupied first by the Germans, then—slicing the country up between them—by the French and the British. For administrative purposes (and no doubt to save money) the latter lumped together “their” bits of the cake with adjacent regions of the then British Nigeria. The French, like the Germans before them, installed a brutal colonial regime based on forced labour and a barrage of repressive laws. Small wonder that Cameroun produced some of the major classics of Africa’s anti-colonial literature, notably Ferdinand Oyono’s novels Houseboy and The Old Man and the Medal (written in tandem, with the author turning back and forth from one to the other, and both published in 1956). Since independence in 1960 the country has been a dictatorship, first under Ahmadou Ahidjo, and after his death—for close to forty years now—under the repugnant Paul Biya. The extent of the regime’s brutality has been consistently understated by the world’s media and by human rights organizations. But one reliable assessment that comes to mind is from a two-volume book called Le Cameroun by French journalist Philippe Gaillard. I don’t have the book to hand, but Gaillard says something like the following: “Is Cameroun really the vast Gulag [ concentration camp] described by dissident writers such as Mongo Beti? No; but the situation is very bad.” Conditions such as obtain in Cameroun must be publicised and appropriate international action taken. I have tried to contribute to this as best I can, for example, writing a review for the South African press (South Africa’s government regularly snuggles up to Cameroun) and for use by Amnesty International of the volume Jail Verse: Poems from Kondengui by Enoh Meyomesse, a poet and opposition figure whom the Biya regime placed under solitary confinement in the appalling Kondengui prison on charges that were blatantly fabricated, and who was refused access to a lawyer and (despite his chronic ill-health) to a doctor. And more on such efforts next week. In recent years the situation in the Anglophone West of the country has gone from bad to worse. A separatist group has been formed called the Southern Cameroon National Council (SCNC), whose motto is “The force of argument, not the argument of force.” To suppress this group, the government organises extra-judicial killings and the burning down of whole villages. The rest of the world more-or-less turns a blind eye, hoping to exploit Cameroon’s considerable mineral resources. Indeed, recently, SCNC asylum-seekers were deported back to their country from the USA, on a flight that they and their lawyers referred to as a “death plane.” To be continued Chris Dunton