Colonial occupation of the Southern Cameroons
By Prof. Carlson Anyangwe.
In its Memorial in Communication 266 complainants asserted and demonstrated that the Southern Cameroons has been annexed by Republique du Cameroun and remains under the colonial occupation of that country. The Commission rightly characterised this development as very serious. Indeed it is, and the people of the Southern Cameroons do not make the charge of colonial occupation lightly. First, the occupying State does not deny that it is in complete and asphyxiating control of the Southern Cameroons and administering the territory following its inherited French system. Over the years it has been fishing for some possible justification of its seizure of that territory. In the 1960s it argued that it simply took over a hitherto separated part of its territory handed over to it by the UN and Britain. When challenged to produce the instrument by which the UN and Britain allegedly ceded the Southern Cameroons to it (a legal impossibility since neither the UN nor Britain were owners of the territory), Republique du Cameroun changed its story. It claimed that its occupation of the Southern Cameroons is by virtue of what it called “reunification on 1st October 1961 following the plebiscite vote on 11 February 1961”. But when it was pointed out that one cannot credibly talk of so-called ‘reunification’ when the Southern Cameroons was never, in the first place, a part of French Cameroun, and when at the plebiscite there was no such option as ‘reunification’ and there could not have been any, Republique du Cameroun then changed once more the basis of its hopeless claim. It then sought to found its claim on a brief and ill-defined German Kamerun entity and then proclaimed itself the state successor to that entity. But German Kamerun (parts of which are now legally within at least five different countries) lasted only some 25-odd years and was long since extinct. Besides, the political existence of Republique du Cameroun dates not from 1884 but from the inception of French colonial rule in 1916.
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Further, it is both a legal and a factual impossibility for a country to succeed at independence not to the territory of the immediate predecessor state but to the territory long extinct of a remote predecessor state. Furthermore, the plebiscite itself was a complete refutation of the lie that the Southern Cameroons is a part of Republique du Cameroun. If the Southern Cameroons were a part of that country the plebiscite would have been redundant and the territory simply handed over to Republique du Cameroun like Ifni handed over to Morocco by Spain, Hong Kong to China by Britain and Walvis Bay to Namibia by South Africa. Claim to territory can never be founded on mere geographical contiguity or on a remote, superficial and ephemeral historical connection. That is why the claim of Spain to Gibraltar and the claim of Argentina to the Falkland Islands have never succeeded. The plebiscite in the Southern Cameroons was a clear and loud statement by the international community that the native inhabitants of the Southern Cameroons constitute a people and therefore have the inalienable and continuing right to self-determination.
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Let the record be put straight. At the plebiscite the people of the Southern Cameroons voted first and foremost to achieve independence (the effective date of which was set by the UN to be 1st October 1961) and, as a secondary matter, to form a political association with Republique du Cameroun under certain terms and conditions. At the plebiscite there was therefore no such thing as a so-called ‘vote for reunification’. There could have been no such vote because there was no such alternative. Nor was there any so-called ‘reunification’ on 1st October 1961. That date was billed as the date on which UN trusteeship over the Southern Cameroons was to end, resulting in independence for the territory; it was also the date on which there was to come into existence an agreed federal form of political association between the Southern Cameroons state and Republique du Cameroun, duly underpinned by an Act of Union subscribed to by both parties.
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But before that date Republique du Cameroun had illegally assumed jurisdiction over the Southern Cameroons by performing acts of sovereignty in the territory, while the British conspiratorially looked the other way. On 1st September 1961 Republique du Cameroun passed in its parliament an annexation law (in the form of a constitutional amendment law deceptively denoted as a ‘federal constitution’) by which it formally claimed the Southern Cameroons as part of its territory and asserted jurisdiction over it. In that same month Republique du Cameroun’s French-led troops marched into the Southern Cameroons and immediately announced their presence and demonstrated their trigger-happy nature by murdering six citizens in cold blood, again while the British looked the other way.
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1st October 1961 witnessed the formal ending of UN trusteeship over the Southern Cameroons. But the independence which the people had voted for and whose effective date the UN had set for 1st October 1961 remains paper independence to this day because its enjoyment was immediately suppressed by Republique du Cameroun in two very significant ways. Republique du Cameroun sent its troops into the Southern Cameroons, with the result that it remains an occupied territory to this day. Then, after the British Commissioner of the Southern Cameroons departed on 1st October 1961 Republique du Cameroun immediately appointed one of its citizens to the Southern Cameroons as the new colonial governor, stepping into the shoes of the departed British Commissioner. The new and French-speaking colonial officer was euphemistically styled ‘inspecteur d’ administration’, a denomination later changed to that of ‘governeur de province/region’. Thus, the so-called ‘reunification’ much trumpeted by Republique du Cameroun is a mere myth and at best a Nazi-type ‘reunification’ of Alsace Lorraine and then Austria, with the Third Reich.
In the 1970s, believing it had achieved its colonial goal of complete assimilation of the people of the Southern Cameroons and total destruction of their identity, and in order to have unhindered access to the wealth and natural resources of the Southern Cameroons, Republique du Cameroun contrived to manufacture another ‘reunification’ which it called ‘unification’, a stage in its imperial agenda admitting of no diversity, no multiculturalism, no multi-nationalism, within its colonial set-up: the Southern Cameroons had to be completely extinguished, its people destroyed as a distinct and separate people and then sunk wholesale into the French world of Republique du Cameroun. But Republique du Cameroun did not reckon with the innate human yearning for freedom, the innate human nature and ability to resist oppression and domination, the innate individual and collective human instinct for survival, and the resilience of the people of the Southern Cameroons in the face of great national adversity and peril.
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