After Colonization: The Question of Unity Over Return

EFFECTS OF COLONIZATION, ITS INFLUENCES ON OUR SOCIETY, and WHAT NEXT?

Jovi on twitter wrote:- “Why ? Like I was running for Office ? I don’t deny being from North West . A place that had culture and tribes before the white man came . I am loyal to my soil and my Ancestors who were not “Anglophones” my grand mother did not speak English . We are all Cameroonians.”

I want to believe all that is in relation to him being flagged for his somewhat denial to identify himself with being “anglophone.“ It brought up the debate about whether we should even talk of a Cameroon since it was also the creation of colonialist. With such idealogical contrasts it becomes clear why we are having trouble creating the loyalty needed to advance our common interests. Trouble that exists because we have been presented with a distracting question of how far then do we roll back - To Kamerun or to Tribe?

The fact is that we have been been colonized and by definition became independent but reality shows us being immensely reliant on our colonial masters; which fosters the subservient relationship we have with them in almost every aspect of life. To easily control us, they had to break our tribal system and implement a system of government that could work for them -at the same time extinguishing the flames of our heritage. They gave us their language and bounded us geographically; creating a society that could only function with knowledge of their language, and thereby forced us to subscribe to a game of which they are the masters.

So how far back do we roll out?

I don’t know and I don’t know if it will help. It rather seems to me that it is too late to turn back. I can imagine a world in which Africa was never colonized and blossomed to be the greatest civilization to ever exist but I can only as much as imagine. I can entertain the idea that the African Man is the ultimate genius but what do I mean by the African man. We have to stop dwelling on history and start thinking about what makes sense now. A United States of Africa is one of those things I believe makes sense. Whether we achieve such unity or not depends on our ability to differentiate between wishful thinking and what is practical.

In a tribute to John McCain (RIP), former U.S President Barack Obama had this to say:- “John understood that our security and our influence was won not just by our military might, not just by our wealth, not just by our ability to bend others to our will, but from our capacity to inspire others with our adherence to a set of universal values like rule of law and human rights, and the insistence on a God given dignity of every human being.”

I will like you to read that quote again and pay attention to the terms MILITARY MIGHT, WEALTH, and ABILITY TO BEND OTHERS TO OUR WILL for those are the things that have created a country which wields so much power over the rest of the world, a country that is the envy of most of the world. I have always liked president Obama because throughout his presidency and after he has continuously revealed the secrets to building strong civilizations. I remember him pointing out on one forum that most of the worlds problems today are caused by old people and their ideas which do not fit in the current context of the world.

For us to be in a position to combat neocolonialism, we have to stop looking backwards and start looking ahead. Which brings me to question whether an independent Ambazonia takes us closer or further away from an African Union -which is by the way the only political structure that can combine our forces to create an entity capable of wielding the military might and wealth necessary to give us the ability to bend others to our will. Can our shared history of being colonized, oppressed, and exploited bring us together or do we want to go back to our precolonial structures which render us even weaker in the current reality of the world? A federal but united Cameroon seems to me like the more forward thinking approach because even under a United States of Africa, we would want to have certain things administered at the local level in what we now have as countries.

Keeping with our philosophical obligations to see the good in the bad, I can say colonization created a platform for us to unite under a shared history and move ahead from our tribal structures that had its own share of intertribal conflicts - structures that if existed today will make us even weaker in the face of globalization. I can also say that colonization taught us the language of the powerful and has now made it possible for us to be able to access the very information which we were turned into slaves for lack of.

You can still hold that Africans were the founders of science and technology bla bla bla but the theory of natural selection now pitches us as the weaker species. If not, how did we end up being the ones to be colonized and exploited?

Please don’t come at me with diagnoses of Stockholm syndrome. It is about time we start facing reality and let our delusions die a natural death. Our progress has always been stifled by our inability to see the bigger picture. That is why today in America, a highway system built over 100 years ago still works and its expansion was preplanned whereas here we build roads without any foresight of their future functionality.

Our ill-informed and myopic view of the world and its inner workings continue to haunt us. This is going to be the subject of my next post. How do we get informed when we have made things like disdain for reading become socially acceptable.

- Tino Foy