Wrapping up our series on the conflict in Cameroon today, we repost Chimamanda Adichie Ngozie’s recent OpEd in the New York Times with an extended introduction by Dr. Cilas Kemedjio which links the potentially tragic nature of succession in Cameroon to actual prior tragedies in Biafra and Congo.
Taking Stock of Biafra’s Ghosts in Cameroon’s Current Events
By: Dr. Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester
David Forsyth, in The Biafra Story, mentions the secession of Southern Cameroons from Nigeria under a plebiscite supervised by the United Nations as an example of a peaceful and orderly process. The Cameroonian government, it is my understanding, lamented and even protested the secession of Northern Cameroons. When France asked the resulting state of Cameroon to back the Republic of Biafra during the Biafra war (1967-1970), then President of the Federal Republic of Cameroon, Ahmadou Ahidjo, declined the request. This decision deprived the Republic of Biafra with its only territorial border. I suspect Ahidjo had his own reasons for standing up to France, who was then his major ally, but we could speculate that Ahidjo was quite aware of the fragility of the 1961 Reunification.
At the time of the Biafra war, the union was quite tenuous because voices that were clamoring for the independence of Anglophone Cameroon were still quite boisterous. Ahidjo, probably in an attempt to preempt both the Congolese and Biafran syndromes, proceeded to cast away the federal system for a unitary Republic in 1972. French political scientist François Bayard surmises that the Biafra war actually led Ahidjo to speed up the process of getting rid of federalism in Cameroon. Bayard says that, wary of the partition contagion in Cameroon, Ahidjo called for the unification referendum earlier that he had planned. When I mentioned to a Cameroonian living in the United States that I was working on the Biafra war, he immediately told me that Biafrans used to stay at the Congo Hotel in his hometown of Kumba. The hotel was probably named Congo because of the resonance of the Congolese crisis in the African imagination at that time. The symbolism of Biafran citizens staying at the Congo Hotel should remind us that Biafra was a tragic echo of Congo. It therefore matters to take stock of Biafra’s ghosts in understanding current events in Cameroon.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s contribution to the New York Times on September 15, 2018 captures the tragedy from the viewpoint of her friend Theo. This personal narrative brings home the stress and real suffering experienced by human beings caught in this conflict. She raises two critical questions: Who belongs to the citizenry? How does the conceptualization of citizenship facilitate or limit access to benefits that are generally understood to derive from belonging to the imagined compact known as the State or the Nation? Ms. Adichie Ngozie, in a well-researched and well-crafted novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, teaches us about the tragedy of Biafra. The conditions of Anglophone Cameroon renew these interrogations to the student of Africa, and for our human conscience.
Find the full piece by Adichie here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/sunday/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-cameroon.html