By Adolf Mongo Dipoko
I remember having lamented in the last issue on this column that the machine stopped, assuming that my mind was a thinking machine. For this simple reason, I was unable to see through the thick dark blanket that had enveloped the horizon, where the real things actually happen. But now, I do see very clearly, and the very first thing that has caught my attention, which now dominates political debates in the country is indeed beating my imagination, no matter how hard I try to caution my mind to be critical.
I have without reservation shown my appreciation that the Head of State has already put in place a commission to look into the stormy issue of the Anglophone problem, which sometimes I am tempted to ask myself whether what has now become a house hold word in the Anglophone part of this our “One and Indivisible Cameroon” is real or imagined. While one voice tells me it is real, the other bounces like a rubber ball from a hard surface saying it is imagined. And this usually depends on the perceptions of the two sides of the divide. However, the truth from all indications is that the Anglophone problem is real. It is only the road map to the solution that remains confusing and meandering.
My greatest fear at the moment is that, we tend to borrow models from across the oceans without actually appraising deeply, the experiences and conditions through which countries whose models we are copying went. I want to believe that our model of a bi-lingual and multi-cultural commission put in place by the head of state takes its pattern from Canada. Like Canada, Cameroon, on account of its reunification in October 1961, is a bi-lingual country, having two official languages, English and French. Like Cameroon, Canada had a bilingual and a bi-cultural problem of English and French. This dual problem degenerated to a point where the President of France at the time, Charles de Gaulle, decided to visit Canada in 1967, towards the end of which visit, the French President was seen to have almost incited the French speaking population of Quebec to seek their freedom from the rest of Canada, by shouting in the middle of his speech, “Long Live Free Quebec”
The direct fallout of President De Gaulle’s encouragement of the people of Quebec to seek their freedom from Canada was that, the government acted promptly and instituted a Commission that was to look into the dual problem of bilingualism and biculturalism. Bilingualism in the sense that it became pertinent that the two languages had to be given equal recognition as the two official languages and treated strictly as such. On the other hand, multiculturalism in the sense that there were two distinct cultures of French and Anglo Saxon heritages in diverse sectors of national life. This was the first step that stabilized Canada’s bicultural diversity.
The second step was that in the course of time, as migrants from various parts of the world came to Canada, there developed another dimension of cultural diversity introduced, by the various cultural groups from other countries other than France and the English speaking world. The result was that there developed the need to address this new development of multiculturalism. The government took appropriate measures to address the issue. In the case of Cameroon, one would want to believe we have skipped the important step of addressing our bicultural diversity as a matter of expedience.
To emphasise multiculturalism in Cameroon, only seems to be addressing a tribal or ethnic multicultural diversity which has never posed any problem since reunification. So when the other day, one of the members of the commission was saying in one of our local television channels, that she is happy to have been nominated in the commission, that she hails from the East region and she is married to someone from the Centre region and that she has never experienced any form of discrimination among the various tribal or ethnic groups who are coexisting peacefully together. What this however shows is that, her mind is already fixed on looking into the problem of tribal or ethnic intolerance, which of course is non-existent in Cameroon and not the much-spoken-about issue of Anglophone marginalisation.
So is the matter not becoming a little confusing?