"Based on research in the region, satellite imagery analysis and video analysis, this report found that both government forces and armed separatists have abused civilians in the western part of the country, displacing over 180,000 people since December 2017. Anglophone separatists have extorted, kidnapped and killed civilians, and prevented children from going to school. In response to protests and violence by armed separatists, government forces have killed civilians, used excessive force against demonstrators, tortured and mistreated suspected separatists and detainees, and burned hundreds of homes in several villages."--Publisher website, viewed August 14, 2018.
This study explores the predicament of Anglophone Cameroon - from the experiment in federation from 1961 to the political liberalisation struggles of the 1990s - to challenge claims of a successful post-independence Cameroonian integration process. Focusing on the perceptions and actions of people in the Anglophone region, Atanga argues that what has come to be called the 'Anglophone Problem' constitutes one of the severest threats to the post-colonial nation-state project in Cameroon. As a linguistic and cultural minority, Anglophone Cameroonians realised that the Francophone-led state and government were keener in assimilation than in implementing the federal and bilingual nation agreed upon at reunification in 1960. Calls for national integration became simply a subterfuge for the assimilation of Anglophones by Francophones who dominated the state and government. The book details the various measures undertaken to exploit the Anglophone regionís economy and marginalise its people. Principally the economic structures meant to facilitate self-reliant development were undermined and destroyed. Institutionalised discrimination took the form of the exclusion of Anglophones from positions of real authority, and depriving the region of any meaningful development. With the advent of multi-party politics, most Anglophone Cameroonians increasingly have made vocal demands for a return to a federation, in order to adequately guarantee their rights and recognition for them as a political and cultural minority. Actively encouraged by France, the Francophone-led regime in Cameroon has refused to yield to such demands, despite the grave danger of violent conflict and possible secession.
This study of Cameroon captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the growing disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. It focuses on the resistance of Anglophone Cameroonians to nationhood, which is being pursued to the detriment of minority identities.
Elections have always been an integral part of post-independence African politics and have assumed utmost importance in the course of recent democratisation processes. However, comparative research on the political development in Africa lacks reliable electoral data. Elections in Africa fills this cap. The handbook is the only reliable source for African elections from independence to present. In the first volume of this series, Elections in Africa presents a country-by-country study of African nations that provides a comparative introduction on elections and electoral systems. Each country chapter examines the history of the institutional and electoral arrangements, the evolution of suffrage and current electoral provisions. Precise and exhaustive data on national elections and referendums are presented comparatively. The book provides a definitive and comprehensive set of data on elections and electoral systems in order to facilitate comparative research. Data is presented in a systematic manner allowing for both historical and cross-national comparisons.
The answers to the questions of why and how people live where they live as well as how they maintain and integrate with one another are fundamental human settlement issues rooted in history and culture. Human settlements are historically linked to resource availability, fortification, and the mythos of civilizations. Cities play a central role in redefining the interface between human beings and nature. They have revolutionized the human experience by taming natural surroundings and building environments that are human-centric-often narrowing human life outside the experience of wilderness or the untamed. This book is divided into three parts, it examines urban development trends, explores perspectives in energy efficiency and agriculture security, and considers policy development and future scenarios in human-nature relations. It is a compendium of multidisciplinary work that challenges the directions of modernity and offers reference to alternatives. Authors come from a diverse background and international context to address common overarching theories facing current geography-specific problems. An interconnected overtone of the book attempts to link accelerated urbanization and settlement location to how societies are maintained and integrated. Human settlements are shaped by human ecology and the relationship between humans and their interaction with their environment. Two sectors central to human survival are specifically explored: energy and agriculture. Cutting-edge, smart development looks at the latest findings that reflect the on-going debate facing these sectors. A human settlement metric is envisioned in terms of the past, present, and future. This book is a unique attempt to combine a rethinking about human settlements for scientists, policy-makers, public officials, and people committed to improving urban life, society-wide. Possible agents to resolving human settlement problems include international cooperation and various mechanisms that interlace the international community. Methodological and applied aspects of sustainable management focus on topics such as adaptive knowledge sharing, renewable energy, climate change, agricultural planning, and policy development. An emphasis on scientific and technological advancement, from a bottom-up mapping of society, elucidates a better understanding of the role of knowledgeable societies in which need is considered alongside how such need can be sustained-advancing towards a more promising future.
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.
"This book documents the battles fought by the Anglophone community in Cameroon to safeguard the General Certificate of Education (GCE), a symbol of their cherished colonial heritage from Britain, from attempts by agents of the Ministry of National Education to subvert it. These battles opposed a mobilised and determined Anglophone civil society against numerous machinations by successive Francophone-dominated governments to destroy their much prided educational system in the name of 'national integration'. When Southern Cameroonians re-united with La Republique du Cameroun in 1961, they claimed that they were bringing into the union 'a fine education system' from which their Francophone compatriots could borrow. Instead, they found themselves battling for decades to save their way of life. Central to their concerns and survival as a community is an urgent need for cultural recognition and representation, of which an educational system free of corruption and trivialisation through politicisation is a key component."--BOOK JACKET.
Cameroon is a country endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals, substantial forests, and a dynamic population. It is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. Although Cameroon has made economic progress since independence, it has not been able to change the dependent nature of its economy. The economic situation combined with the dismal record of its political history, indicate that prospects for political stability, justice, and prosperity are dimmer than they have been for most of the country's independent existence. The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon has been updated to reflect advances in the study of Cameroon's history as well as to provide coverage of the years since the last edition. It relates the turbulent history of Cameroon through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Cameroon history from the earliest times to the present.
