Language as a Tool for Exclusion: Reflections on Cameroon's National Bilingualism Day

By Dibussi Tande

Today is National Bilingualism Day in Cameroon. I didn’t even know that such a day existed until I read about it in the Monday, January 30, 2006 online edition of the Government-owned daily, Cameroon Tribune.

According to an article in the newspaper titled "Bilingualism is still a Challenge”, this day was instituted because,

Bilingualism is enshrined in the Constitution of Cameroon since September 1st, 1961, when English and French were recognised as official languages, with equal status in every sphere of national life. Bilingualism was chosen, not only as an instrument to ensure equity, but also as a pivot of socio-economic integration for the two entities, Francophone and Anglophones, who opted for unification.

Now, that it is the political theory, the national fairy tale.

Here is the reality as reported by the Buea-based The Post newspaper: "French Frustrates ASMAC Anglophone Students", screams the headlines in a story about the plight of English-speaking students in the Advanced School of Mass Communications at the University of Yaoundé. According to The Post:

Only 3 of the 42 permanent lecturers in the Advanced School of Mass Communication, ASMAC, are of English expression. Over the years, English-speaking students in ASMAC just like other higher education institutions in Yaoundé receive lectures almost exclusively in French. Some English-speaking students have described this situation as ‘deplorable’.

Yes, that is the real Cameroon where the English language and English Speaking Cameroonians are treated like inconvenient step-children who are barely tolerated.

Institutional and systemic marginalization
The simple truth is that in as much as Cameroonians obsess about national unity and nationhood, those in charge rarely go out of their way to ensure that these political clichés become reality, not even through largely symbolic gestures such as having a fully bilingual website for the Presidency of the Republic, arguably the official gateway of the Cameroon government.

Such acts of omission go to reinforce the feelings of institutional and systemic marginalization that run rampant in the ex-British Southern Cameroons; feelings that have largely contributed in creating the combustible socio-political climate that now exists in the region. Cameroon may be officially bilingual, but there is ample evidence that English and English-speaking Cameroonians are generally an afterthought to the movers and shakers of its predominantly Francophone socio-political system.

This is a serious problem which has absolutely nothing to do with English-speaking Cameroonians stupidly aping the "Anglo-Saxons" or "always whining" about their lot in Cameroon, as some have argued. It is a question of the government failing to use all the means at its disposal to create a climate of inclusion indispensable in building that mythical "Cameroon nation" that government officials always talk about.

A few years ago, I had a discussion with a Cameroonian translator who revealed that even though he was head of a translation department made up of three Francophones and two Anglophone translators, officials in the ministry in question either simply ignored the translation bureau and put out official documents solely in French, or generally went ahead and did the English translations themselves, with monstrous results. He stated that whenever confronted by the translators (since this reflected poorly on the translation department), the standard response from ministry officials was "le message passe quand même" ... a clarion call for mediocrity which has, ironically, never been used as the standard for official government documents published in French...

"Le message passe quand même" was the same response given by Yaoundé Urban Council officials back in the early 1990s when they launched a multimillion clean-up campaign but did not bother to have the campaign posters translated into English by someone with even a rudimentary mastery of the English language. The result? The French campaign slogan "Balayer, nettoyer, ramasser la saleté c'est bien. Ne pas salir c'est mieux" was translated as follows: "Sweep, clean away, to gather dirtiness is good, not to make dirty is better". When questioned about this linguistic massacre, the response was that Anglophones should at least be happy that an attempt was made to have posters in both English and French. Yes, the Yaoundé urban council had just done Anglophones a huge favor, and these ungrateful Anglos were complaining as usual!!!! As CRTV journalist Sam Nuvalla Fonkem later pointed out in an article in Cameroon Life Magazine, there could not have been a more insidious way of making Anglophone Cameroonians and the official language of Anglophone Cameroon seem inconsequential, if not an outright nuisance within the bilingual Cameroon Republic.

National unity in perspective
Sometimes, "national unity" or national inclusion is not just about the distribution of the "national cake" or about the attribution of cabinet positions to different regions. In many cases, it is about largely symbolic but emotionally-laden issues such as language matters. As Rothchild and Foley have rightly noted ("African States and the Politics of Inclusive Coalitions." In The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa, edited by D. Rothchild and N. Chazan, Boulder: Westview Press, 1988);

Not all group actors will be mobilized around distributive issues. Inevitably, those issues with a symbolic dimension in a pluralist society - group status, identity or territory - are likely to become the basis for more inelastic or non-negotiable communal claims, setting the stage for intense conflicts of a political nature.

The rise of “Anglophone extremism" or "Southern Cameroons Nationalism" in recent years is largely the result of Cameroonian leaders ignoring these inelastic communal claims.

The irony is that it is the country as whole that loses in the long run as a result of the lack of political will to establish truly bilingual institutions. A case in point: In 2000, The Cameroon Tourism Board came up with the idea of selling the country via the Internet, and to set up a website for that purpose - http://www.cameroun-infotourisme.com. Unlike the website of the Presidency whose English section has been “under construction” since 1996, this one does not even pretend to have an English section. A website aimed at marketing a bilingual country in to the world is entirely in French!!! Without doubt, this oversight is deeply rooted in a Cameroonian political culture whose hallmark is systemic or institutional monolingualism. No wonder veteran Cameroonian journalist, Abel Mbengue once described Cameroon as a "pays francophone bilingue" …

The Tourism Board officials are totally oblivious to the fact that advertising a country's socio-economic and touristic potential in more than one language increases that country's marketability, and brings in more revenue from tourism. In Cameroon, where language has become a tool for exclusion, this obvious fact is lost to its ruling class.

Facing the democratic challenge
The democratic challenge in a plural society, Author Lewis once argued (in Politics in West Africa, London: Allen and Unwin, 1965),

is to create political institutions which give all the various groups the opportunity to participate in decision-making, since only thus can they feel that they are full members of a nation, respected by their more numerous brethren, and owing equal respect to the national bond which holds them together.

This is a challenge that the predominantly Francophone Cameroonian ruling elite -- who have largely excluded one official language from state institutions -- have failed to live up to, in spite of their repeated references to those bonds that allegedly bind English and French-speaking Cameroonians together as a people.

Language is a vehicle for identity and participation, and by institutionalizing the marginalization of one official language, the Cameroon government is in effect preventing citizens who use this language from fully participating in national life. And, even when these citizens do master "the language of gods", they still feel alienated from these institutions, from government, and from the rest of the nation. Yes, Cameroon’s “language problem” is neither pedagogic nor individual, it is political. And, it is at the core of Cameroon's unending crisis of identity.

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Comments

[Louis]

You have answered the question as it really is. English-Speaking Cameroonians have no legal claim to La Republique Du Cameroun. They cannot point to any international document that incorporated their own State to the State of Cameroon. English-Speaking Cameroonians and their territory in effect are not protected by any legal document. La
Republique du Cameroun applied to the UN once -- in 1960 -- without Southern Cameroons. They have never applied again as a United country. As a result, your statement is not only true as regards the
treatment of English-Speaking Cameroonians, it is also legally true.
Southern Cameroonians are basically international orphans residing as adopted children in LRC and strangely in their own Southern Cameroons territory -- The Palestinian problem is far better at this stage. It is hard for our people to accept this. But that, I'm afraid, is the truth.

We are actually accepting this status in an "orphanage" by sitting back and watching. This is totally unacceptable. People must challenge this system aggressively until it is killed. How it is
going to die is another matter.

[Hillary]

Bilingualism! Pure illusions.

Ever read this statement somewhere"
"Le présent décret/ arrêté etc sera enregistré, publié suivant la proédure d'urgence, puis inséré au journal officiel en français et en anglais" What a farce!!!

Think of governing instruments that direct the nation Cameroon such as Decrees and Ministerial orders/decisions are only in FRENCH showing total proof of bilingualism of illusions.

Think of a technical Higher Education School such as ENSET that hardly makes bilingualism compulsory and churns out teachers who can hardly express themselves in English let alone know the English technical
jargon. Yet these teachers are sent to monolingual English schools were they sow only confusion.

Go the Website of the Prime Minister of Cameroon (Governments on the WWW: Cameroon) and look at the webpage. It is supposedly bilingual but the check out the laws and regulations section. It is written in most texts
"Only french version available" This means there are no English texts.

Ever heard of OHADA, It took a tug of war for those in Anglophone provinces working in English to have English versions of of OHADA. Even then OHADA working language is FRENCH. Yet such an instrument that touches the daily lives of all Cameroonians contravenes the Constitution since it points to one language.

Perhaps at some point, we have to look straight into our souls and search what has gone wrong.

In this light, I point an accusing finger at those translators/Interpreters of various ministries who done so much wrong despite being paid.

[Ma Mary]

I surely arrived at my elastic limit long ago and many have come to my point of view. It is long past time for Southern Cameroonians (so called Anglophones) to move on. The word anglophone is actually problematic, because the original word was francophone, and referred exclusively to the french global cultural project. There is no similar anglosaxon project. It is a title that must be rejected by Southern Cameroonians because it has no historical or legal valency. There is no place to it. It is an emblem of dispossession.

[Fritzane Kiki]

If we talk of bilingualism as being practical then we are not being honest.Bilingualism is just a notion that binds us together as Cameroonians.The Anglophones know this phenomenon very well and they have accepted it from time immemorial.The image of the Anglophones in Cameroon is just like a bastard son who is just lost standing on the fence.

We have a long way to go in so far as Bilingualism is concerned.The French stooges of the Etoudi regime does not recognise English as a medium of communication and that's why they have little or no rule to implement it in the schools and other services.Anglophones are fored to learn and Speak French because the Francophones are not bilingual enough.

I am afraid the revolution and evolution of the English Language is growing deeper and deeper and at one point we come to see the Francophones learning English not beacause Cameroon is a bilingual country but because English has become a major tool for travelers and businessmen world wide.

[paolo laurent]

thanks louis, for your very honest and
truthful writing, this is what i was told
long ago in 1979 by my late unce. when i was aboy. i came to realise that he too is right, but the question, how do our southern cameroonians(ambazonias) politicians. chiefs,fons,school teachers, reason, dont they know this truth, and facts, what are they suppose to pass on to their children as their history?
if any thing worth having is, your heritage and history not money or brobery from the french camerouese, to colonise our people
through the fons and chiefs.

soo, wake up brothers, knowledge is power
if all 6.5m of us educate our children as to ours, then even their whole army wont
destroy our future, but to just obey their
laws, ohada, cap feicom, government delegate.
appointed governors, french cam, transplanted citizens in our soil is unacceptable.

[paolo laurent]

THE HEADING SHOULD READ

LANGUAGE AS A TOOL FOR EXTERMINATION,
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE ANGLOSAXON CULTURE
OF SOUTHERN CAMEROONS(UN TRUST TERRITORY)

[Mondo]

The revamped website of the Cameroon Presidency http://www.prc.cm/ doesn't even try to pass off as a bilingual website. It is entirely in French...

[Ma Mary]

Mondo, do you know what that means? It could mean one of two things:

1) la republique believes that we have been assimilated completely or colonized for good so it is not worth pretending anymore.

2) la republique believes in its heart that we have gone, it is just a matter of time, so again it not worth trying or pretending anymore.

Either way, it means bye bye.

[paolo laurent]

years ago, before the creation of SDF
There was a meeting in WASHINGTON,DC, with
people from southern cameroons, talking i just happen to be in the room as avisitor,
They were narrating the illusion of what
we have been decieved in the 60s as a federal union ,into a province today.
I asked one person, WHY CANT ALL ANGLOPHONES WHO ARE EMPLOYED BY THIS GOVERNMENT RESIGN THEIR POST, IN PROTEST FOR

[li]

cool down guys cool down
don't be so pessimistic. we will never be smatched. hatred will not solve anything. if you look at it well, more and more francophones are trying to speak english in the world, they will never be able to "exterminate" us . "i have a dream...' don't fight a lion with a gun, look for a flower......... peace peace peace

[Larry Eyong]

DIBUSSI, That you got that "translation" is pure genius. In 1993 I saw it in Biyem Assi, Yaoundé and was so angry. I have since been regretting that I did not immortalize it. You did it. Thanks.

[Ebai Emmanuel Ewangi]

Truth hatred will not solve any thing