allAfrica.com: Cameroon: Political Philosophies & Nation Building (Page 1 of 1)

Titles: Political Philosophies & Nation Building In Cameroon,Author: Nfamewih Aseh,Publisher: Unique Printers, Bamenda, 2006, Reviewer:Azore Opio

If you want to know about the much abused nation building of Cameroon, you should read this book. It is a reconstruction of Cameroon's political history and a veritable attempt to unravel and examine the liberation struggle which ended prematurely and a nation building that turned into destruction instead.

The volume also covers a precise backdrop to slavery and slave trade, colonisation, the two World Wars and repression; all of which drained Africa of its human as well as natural resources. And now, Africa's poverty and, of course, Cameroon's, is defined according to European standards.

Consequently, there are concepts such as civilisation, democracy, human rights, modernity, globalisation, international peace, development and the like which are grounded in European cultures and against which Cameroon's poverty or prosperity are erroneously measured. All these contribute to entrenching the dependency syndrome.

The Cameroonian elite, being middlemen in the exploitation process, take advantage with flamboyant rhetoric to skim off the cream of the economy. They are active participants in the malicious design of impoverishing Cameroonians. And poor Cameroonians just get on with life believing that, in the words of Ahidjo and Biya, Cameroon is a prosperous and peaceful country.

Aseh examines and evaluates the concept of nation-building in Cameroon and the failure to establish a self-sufficient political ideology to govern the society without external manipulation. When he embarked on his research for the book, his level of bile was up to his nostrils.

But with self-confidence and a gift for digging up details that hardly reach the public, he weaved 261 pages of an audacious and incisive book about Cameroon's false and borrowed political philosophies. His is an admirable attempt to rubbish Amadou Ahidjo's and Paul Biya's political thoughts as pseudo isms skimmed from archaic and impracticable Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of nation building.

Thus, both men having been tarred with the same brush and having ascended to power without the mandate of the people ('Frenchified' stool pigeons) so to speak, and malleable collaborators in the rape of Cameroon; crusaders of foreign capital, failed in their quasi nation-building project.

Aseh portrays Biya's New Deal dreams as a transposed version of Ahidjo's French-tailored Plan Liberalism. Ahidjo, argues, Aseh, never had any political philosophy of his own. He was merely the General Manager of French economic interests; the head of state of a French overseas territory and the manager of France's farmland who embarked on a dictatorship to ensure that French designs to exploit Cameroon worked.

Then Biya took over from him, in the same spirit. His national integration lyrics turned out to be national disintegration. His concept of communal liberalism merely handed over the economy to foreign control.

Throughout Aseh's discourse, we discern a tragedy: Ahidjo's and Biya's visions of national unity brought Cameroonians under servitude with the two aristocratic bureaucrats "forgetting to work out a strategy on how Cameroonians, as a people, not as the state, was to acquire land to constitute the basis of a gradual process for socio-cultural integration..."

He unveils the cynical back-stage manipulators; Western imperialism and French neo-colonialist machinations that have stifled self-determination and lays out the intentions of the designers and supervisors of post-colonial Cameroon. It seems there is no Cameroonian indigenous political thought. Nation-building in Cameroon was externally manipulated.

This was inadequate to develop a self-sufficient "system of thought..." In this vein, Aseh skilfully weaves in globalisation as a world of continuing slavery with the West constituting itself into a "ubiquitous invisible hand that manipulates the global economy and the relations of power both on the international scene and in almost all non-European societies, and particularly in African societies..."

For Aseh, Cameroon has never, since colonial days, defined and designed an ideology of its own. Cameroonians, in other words, have no original ideology of their own; they wait for "development" to come from the white man. If they work hard enough, they can become "caricatures of Europeans."

According to Aseh, there is "deceptive façade called Cameroon with no genuine programmes to foster economic and political freedoms"; there have only been predatory regimes with a non-productive, non-nation building elite.

Aseh's concern, a vein that runs through the book, is the deprivation of Cameroonians of their ability for self-composition to regenerate themselves economically, politically and socially. Perhaps only the Ruben Um Nyobes and the Felix Roland Moumies resisted the entrenchment of the white man's (French) colonial machinery.

But the UN and the French imperialists quashed their dreams of a free and indigenously ruled Cameroon. Um Nyobe, for example, laid down a political agenda to resist European imperialism. But Ahidjo was used to subvert this cause. The UN became a rather partial arbitrator. The British too, helped to stifle the liberation struggle in the Cameroons. Consequently, there is no national consciousness and collective action.

The book attempts to reclaim degraded humanity and material disposition which have been constantly trampled by political parties that lack the virulent and radical vision of revolutionary groupings. It succeeds as an intellectual inquiry and quest for an appropriate political philosophy and a national identity.

Despite a few typographical devils, Political Philosophies & Nation Building In Cameroon is a smooth ride, intellectually ticklish, a treasure trove of rare intelligence and a complete digest of the destruction of a nation.

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