Why Cameroon Needs a Fundamental Change

By: Janvier Tchouteu

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Kamerun, Cameroun or Cameroon, a former German colony with a vibrant economy that Germany lost to Britain and France following its defeat in the First World War, a territory partitioned by Britain and France into British Cameroons (British Southern Cameroons and British Northern Cameroons) and French Cameroun, territories Kamerunian civic-nationalists sought to reunite and achieve independence for in a quest that was suppressed by French-led forces, resulting in the loss of half a million Cameroonian lives from 1956-1971. France’s clamp down on French Camerounian civic-nationalists happened despite the fact that the territory was the first recruiting base for exiled French General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French Forces that went on to liberate France. In this country variously described as “Africa in miniature” that is still haunted by an unfinished liberation struggle where those in power are not the people who asked for independence, where the two heads of states in its entire history have not been the choice of the people, but rather the choice of France, a political mafia reigns that keeps the human-and-material-resources-rich country bogged down in underdevelopment. The system in Cameroon exemplifies FrancAfrique, a term used in naming and denouncing name the many concealed bonds between France and Africa.